Windows Powershell: Microsoft Munched My Monad!

As a network administrator I have several Windows-based servers under my care. Administration of these servers is not that difficult considering that most of the maintenance tasks I need to do can be done using its GUI (graphical user interface) environment. I rarely need to fire up Windows' DOS interface and if I do, I do not have problems using it since I learned to use computers way back when DOS was *the* operating system on most computers. I'm actually so comfortable in using DOS, I often go back to using it whenever I'm looking for a file or if I need to do some directory maintenance (like deleting files/folders, moving them to different partitions, etc.).

When the next version of Windows was announced (the operating system formerly known as Longhorn, currently known as Vista), Microsoft also announced a more powerful command line interface for it and they named it "MONAD". I was actually pretty excited about that piece of news because as I've said, I'm quite comfortable in using CLI (command line interface) as well as GUI. Months later, Microsoft announced that they are not releasing MONAD with the release of Vista and they renamed MONAD to a more "corporate" MSH (for Microsoft Shell). A good news/bad news sort of scenario: they delayed the release of MONAD (the bad news) but renamed it into a more apt "MSH".

Now, Microsoft has just announced the availability of "Windows Powershell" (the shell formerly known as MSH, previously known as MONAD) Release Candidate 1 and it is actually ready for download. Well, I'm not expecting much from this version since I'm sure this will screw up my system if I do install it but there is one thing I may need to do -- download as much documentation of "Microsoft Powershell" because I'm sure it will be a lot different from the DOS that I know by heart.

technorati tags: microsoft, monad, msh, powershell