Microsoft Next Generation Shell

An anonymous reader writes "I found this while searching for Perl Jobs in India: "The Microsoft Next Generation Shell Team is designing and developing a new command line scripting environment from the ground up. The new shell and utilities, based on the .NET Frameworks, will provide a very rich object-based mechanism for managing system properties. To be delivered in the next release of Windows, it will include the attributes of competitors' shells (e.g. aliases, job control, command substitution, pipelines, regular expressions, transparent remote execution) plus rich features based on Windows and .NET (e.g. command discovery via .NET reflection API's, object-based properties/methods, 1:many server scripting, pervasive auto-complete)."

Comments

wonder what this means

[neildogg]

"Candidates should have Windows NT or Windows 2000 system programming experience, development experience with object-oriented languages and design methodologies as well as with scripting and shell languages like PERL, Python and Bash. Candidates should have at least 2-5 years experience (based on level interviewing for) in high technology, preferably delivering products for both Windows and non-Windows operating systems."

I guess Microsoft has viewed users of other platforms as important before (recruiting of Palm developers) but this seems like a direct call to Unix (mostly Linux) developers to make Windows shell exactly like other existing technology. Though I can't say I'm surprised, I think this is one of the first times where Microsoft seems to have stated that they are persuing similar technologies.

Re:wonder what this means

[IamTheRealMike]

Though I can't say I'm surprised, I think this is one of the first times where Microsoft seems to have stated that they are persuing similar technologies.

Actually, the next version of IIS has dropped the binary metabase and has replaced it with XML config files, so IIS can be administered by hand, just like Apache (but with a pretty GUI if you want one). Maybe as part of this next-gen shell they'll introduce a good command line text editor.

This sounds to me very much like Microsoft is having a good hard look at what Linux/open source does well, and copying it. Fair game - we've copied them plenty, and are continuing to do so. We could well find that Windows moves on a lot thanks to the competition offered by Linux: will we be able to keep up, and keep pushing things forward to? I think so. I hope so. But the era of kicking Windows for being unstable is already over, insecure looks on its way out (I read coders can get fired now for writing insecure code at redmond), and soon traditional UNIX strongholds like good remote administration may no longer be unique either.

We have our own stupid problems to fix too of course. Lack of a decent object model? Lack of binary portability? That one is killing us at the moment, and there is no good solution (as I'm finding out as part of my project). We really really don't want to have to setup build farms (a binary for every distro version), that'd suck. But it seems the very nature of Linux itself dictates it. Now Windows is moving to .NET they are tidying up a lot of these problems, while we're still playing catchup.

It's certainly going to get interesting soon. Microsoft have sort of woken up.

Development in India

[slashuzer]

It would be interesting to know just how much of Microsoft's "future devlopment" are being made in India. My guess is that the OS, Office etc continue to be further developed by the team(s) in Redmond, but most new products/services are being developed in India.

A good thing, really.

[bdowne01]

Actually, I'm really intrigued about the possiblity of having a "strong" shell on Windows. It's one of the main reasons I can't find myself using Windows for much.

Usually, if I had to...I just installed Cygwin and used it from there. However, the interaction between the actual Windows environment and Cygwin was a little cumbersome--but usable. I've written some crazy shell scripts using Cygwin, but trying to run a Windows command using variables from the script can be tricky, for example.

However this opens up some other nice possibilities for a Windows environment. If the shell they create is complete enough, you may not even need stupid "remote control" apps, instead you could just SSH into the box and take care of things.

On the other hand, I guess it just makes Windows easier to crack too ;)

Re:Cygwin

[joeykiller]

How this can be considered Insightful beats me. Cygwin is an attempt to create a Unix emulation layer on Windows, while this apparently describes a fully flegded .Net integrated shell enviroment for Windows.

If this is true, this will (in my opinion) give Windows a tremendously powerful and coherent (i.e. a single understandable object model and class library) scripting and shell environment.

Say what you will about Cygwin - I like Cygwin a lot and use it daily - but it cannot be said to be coherent and consisting of well integrated parts.

MS was at USENIX/SAGE asking what makes a good CLI

[furry_wookie]

FYI.. .I was at the USENIX/SAGE L.I.S.A Confrence 2002 in Philly a few weeks ago, and some guys from Microsoft had a late night get together to talk to us unix people. I couldn't not go, after all it was Microsoft at a 100% NIX-only event, so I figured some fun would be had at their expense.. It was called: UNIX + Windows Admin Management with Scripting & Command Line: What are your requirements?, and was on thursday night. The point of the meeting is that, they wanted to know from UNIX admins what makes a good Command Line environment and what it would take to make Windows have as powerfull a CLI as Unix. They pretty much told us that there is a LARGE high-level project at Microsoft to make Windows servers to be as easy to manage and configure as Unix servers from a serial port with no gui required. What is their REAL goal: From what I could tell its simple... they want to eliminate the competitive advantage that UNIX has with the CLI. That this away from NIX as a "advantage", then thats one less think people can point to as something that Windows lacks. They want to be able to honsetly say... "Unix isnt any easier/more-powerful on the CLI than Windows." After all, that is one of the SINGLE LARGEST differences there are today between their product and NIX. Take that argument away, and you have a huge marketing/argument weapon against us NIX people.