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Windows to Have Better CLI
MickyJ writes "The command line interface to the Windows Server OS will be changed to the new Monad Shell (MSH), in a phased implementation to take place over the next three to five years. 'It will exceed what has been delivered in Linux and Unix for many years', so says Bob Muglia, a Senior VP at Microsoft." More from the Tom's Hardware article: "The language in Muglia's comment offers the first clear indication that WMI may be yet one more component being left behind, as Microsoft moves away from portions of Windows architecture that have historically been vulnerable to malicious attack."
Unix have no Monads.
Gr@ve_Rose
!ekoj on si aixelsyD
"The language in Muglia's comment offers the first clear indication that WMI may be yet one more component being left behind, as Microsoft moves away from portions of Windows architecture that have historically been vulnerable to malicious attack."
1. Write complex management interface
2. Shore up security holes over many years of use and testing
3. Ditch for new immature code
4. ?
5. Profit!
If they're ditching WMI it *won't* be for security reasons.
Microsoft ignoring the command line is just as silly as ignoring the Internet. It's only taken them longer to realise because only power-users and sysadmins are affected instead of every user.
Next Headline on Slashdot:
Microsoft Pushes Back Longhorn Until 2008 Over New CLI and Changing of "My"
Dashboard Widgets
Bah:
"...will exceed what has been delivered in Linux and Unix for many years. It will take three to five years to fully develop and deliver."
Somehow I'm not too worried.
Now, I don't know much about this but I do have a few questions. What all will this be likely to change? Also, once the biggest company in the world uses it, how will it be so secure? If so many people are using it, arent they more likely to find problems with it? Or am I just uneducated?
Yay, I have a sig.
They change their entire platforms over 2 years, and MS will spend 3-5 years changing the default shell? :p
How about announcing great new technology that actually works today?
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
Better than Bash? I guess they'll be using Zsh then. :-)
...you just gotta go download it from here.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Unless I can get transparent terminals. That is what really holds back MS in the server market. I mean, how useful is a shell unless you can see through it?
And it's vera nice!
Can you say bash from cygwin?!? thought you could
It exists. Unfortunately, it is nasty to use. Commands are long and it makes heavy use of COM (So much for .NET). I have no doubt that it will be heavily exploited by virii and phishers. So I don't think bash is in any danger of being replaced.
Sorry my bullshit sensor overloaded.
Actually, MSH has been available for public beta (if you're enrolled in MSDN, anyway) for quite some time now -- I've been using it on my Windows XP box at home just to test it out. In general.. yes, it's actually quite good, and up to the standard of Bash for most tasks. It's a huge step away from the WinXP command prompt, and represents something of a climbdown for Microsoft, who said they would be moving away from the CLI in future OSes. In addition, it may amuse the /. readers (it certainly amused me) that the Microsoft names for commands have nearly all been aliased to their UNIX equivalents by default. Obviously, Bill doesn't expect his names to stick. ;)
Isn't this just a case of: "Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it -- badly". -- Henry Spencer.
Soon they'll be storing config in files, and have a CLI only version of their server.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Microsoft has never "gotten" regular expressions, and I doubt they're about to. Also, there's still the silly reliance on the file extension to tell the operating system how to handle a particular file.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
For all the 13-year olds on /. who think they're funny, here's where the word monad really comes from.
Go somewhere random
Also, who here believes MSH actually stands for Microsoft Shell?
Who cares? MSH will be pronounced as "mash" and this will develop a related song for sysadmins to sing on Haloween:
I was working in the lab late one night
When my eyes beheld an eerie sight
For my server from his slab began to rise
And suddenly to my surprise
He did the MSH
He did the Microsoft MSH
The Microsoft MSH
It was a server smash
He did the MSH
It caught on in a flash
He did the MSH
He did the Microsoft MSH
Catchy, no?
More
From dictionary.com:
mo-nad n.
1. Philosophy. An indivisible, impenetrable unit of substance viewed as the basic constituent element of physical reality in the metaphysics of Leibnitz.
So it's a real word, and I can kinda sorta see why they chose it. I agree that it's unfortunate, though, and I think "MSH" (pronounced the obvious way) is a perfectly reasonable name.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
You can already copy from/ paste to Window's default CLI (highlight text and press ENTER to copy; right-click to paste - same with cygwin). I don't know about cutting, though.
It's good to see competition and interest in this domain, it means :
...
- More power to the Windows sysadmins
- Push the evolution of some of the apparently stagnant Unix shells
- This time see a difference between major versions of Bash (I mean I use Bash everyday and didn't see a difference between 2.x and 3.x, I mean a big difference).
-
strcpy, providing root to hackers since 1972!
It is interesting that they are now trying to implement a command line competitive with BASH....what year is this again?
The year is 1973. Apple Computations Inc. have just announced that they are switching to the cutting-edge Zilog Z80 architecture for their range of low-cost pocket calculators; Sony Industrial Consumer Electronics are making use of an innovative new Integrated Circuit for their Alpha-Max-3 video system which contains at least five separate transistors; the Duke Nukem Forever board-game has been given a favourable reception at the Entertaining Entertainment Exposition at the Crystal Palace, London, and now Micro-Soft-Ware are designing their new, BASIC-derived timesharing shell for competing against the burgeoning MULTICS.
Well, you did ask...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
A quick list of functions and examples, looks very Bourne.
l 9.MSHQuickStart
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channe
Its about bloody time.
VBS is a peice of crap, and is way to complicated for what should be simple tasks, MSH looks pretty damn promising.
IIRC, the main difference that MS is touting over traditional *IX shell environments is that pipelines can exchange typed data instead of simply text.
It's an interesting idea, though I'm not sure that I'd call it earth-shattering. This is an interface that applications need to support.
I think that the main way that they could offer value over the *IX world is by providing an lower-learning-curve-shell. Traditionally, this is how Microsoft has managed to offer value over Unix.
I'd like to see the *IX world get a fully-blown DAG-of-programs data stream processing environment, instead of just a linear pipeline. Gegl (the GIMP redesign) does this for graphics, but there's no reason that this can't be a feature that shells provide and something that works with data other than image data.
(Technically you can do this in Unix today with named pipes, which the Windows world sadly lacks, but it's not as nice and transparent as it could be.)
Actually, I guess you could do this with the mingw port of netcat in Windows...hmm...but even less transparent.
The shell that MS had for a while wasn't great, but the virtual terminal absolutely sucked. It was slow, laggy, required you to use the mouse for common operations, didn't follow accepted selection convention, hard-wrapped lines when copying text out of the thing, didn't grow the scrollbar as the scrollback buffer grew, lacks tabs, and about eight million other problems. That, I think, is one of the biggest things that they could improve.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
So.. I wanted to know what the language could do, what it's feature set were etc. so I went to the quickstart guide at the MSH Wiki site ( http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel 9.MSHQuickStart ).
IMHO this looks a lot like perl, but with enough changed so people dont start looking through their code for 'Copyright (c) Larry Wall'... This is real innovation.. whatever.
Forgive me for being naive, but couldn't Microsoft just develop stronger Windows bindings for Perl? It's battle hardened, already widly known and documented around the work.. not to mention you would ge the benifit of CPAN for additional modules (Would you trust Microsoft to write your date manipulation functions? hah!)
And we all know somebody will work out how to run MSH code from deep within some other subsystem-by-proxy and inevitably cause another wave of virii (by this time Microsoft will be touting it's anti-virus software etc.)
Oh the end is neigh, the sky will fall, etc. etc... I'll just shut up now and get back to some work.
There are two and a half things that bug the hell out of me with the current CLI:
1. The tab completion behavior (the 'half' part of my 2 1/2 gripes is sometimes you have to fiddle with a registry setting to turn on tab completion). A unix shell (well, the one I'm used to, not even sure which) will complete only up to the point where its unique, and then I can hit Ctrl-D to see possible completions. A lot more predictable than tabbing through all completions that might fit what you've typed...the distinction between "characters I typed myself" and "characters showing up because I'm cycling through" has no visual cue, even though it completely controls what files get shown.
2. up arrow behavior. It took me a while to finally "get" the logic of Windows...if you type command A, then command B, then command C, then arrow back up to B and run that, pressing down will then take you to C and up will take you to A. I think that it's meant to cover a long sequence of commands that you do over and over, so you don't have to keep uparrowing, but just pressing down once per repeated command, but its much harder to keep a mental model of.
Both of these things are classic Window's trade off of predictability for perceived "user friendliness". I think hackers often prefer predicitability and ease of mental modeling, since they can always make it easier by some scripting or whatever.
On the other hand, I like that I can add "\.." to the end of a filename and get to its directory. That's something that seems logical to me that Unix shells don't generally do.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
"Reducing scripting privileges may break some existing Web applications, especially intranet apps geared for enterprises."
This is interesting though: Internet applications are catching on, Firefox marketshare has scared Microsoft a bit, and what do they do in response: Fix their security holes by taking away features which now give them a lead in companies?
I would rethink that one it I were head of MS IE division.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
But will they swap \ for / ? THAT's what I want. The entire cosmos now uses /. er... '/'. ...though I suspect the entire cosmos DOES use /. to blather about their preferred operating system and how kids in trenchcoats are being oppressed by jonkatz or... something...
I'd suggest you take of your Microsoft bashing hat and come out side, Monad has been in public beta for nearly a year now, want to take a look?
1. You will need need a passport account. If you do not have one yet, you can sign-up for one at the beta website listed below.
2. Goto http://beta.microsoft.com/
3. Log into the site using the following guest ID: mshPDC
4. Select Microsoft Command Shell
5. Select Survey in the left column
6. Register with a valid email address.
7. Wait for the information to be sent to you through email. (May take a day or two)
8. Once you receive your confirmation email, log back into http://beta.microsoft.com/ for the content
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I haven't looked at the specs, since I don't work much with windows servers anymore, but I'm curious: one of the major advantages with UNIX boxes is that most of the software you work with has some sort of CLI, or at least has hooks that can read data produced from the command line.
.NET classes - will we finally be able to hook into more applications and actually do useful things at the command line now, or will this mainly benefit programmers who are trained in OO concepts rather than sysadmins?
Windows, on the other hand, has always been particularly bad about that - most apps don't have any support for that sort of thing. Scripting in the windows world has been fairly pointless. Sure, a lot of sysadmin tasks can be performed using the command line, but limitations in the shell make that a pain in the ass. CMD.exe isnt' anywhere near UNIX shells as far as programmability is concerned, and windows lacks the plethora of command line shell enhancing utilities (i.e. sed, grep, etc.) that makes the UNIX shell environment so useful?
This is talking about using COM and
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Ah, Multics... Now there was an OS that would be really useful these days. It was possible to define security layers so that you couldn't even access your own files without being in the exact right security access level. It would be really funny watching the FBI trying to extract personal information from a properly configured Multics system, where you don't even know what the security levels are called, let alone have access to them...
Geesh.. I was thinking the other mash.. Through early morning fog I see visions of the things to be the pains that are withheld for me I realize and I can see... [chorus]: That Microsoft is clueless They bring on many changes and I can take or leave it if I please. I try to find a way to make all our systems relate without that ever-present slate but now I know that it's too late, and... [Chorus] The unix shell is hard to play I'm gonna learn it anyway The Linux card I'll someday lay so this is all I have to say. [Chorus] The only way to win is cheat And lay it down before I'm beat and to another give my seat for that's the only painless feat. [Chorus] MASH The sword of time will pierce our shells It doesn't work when it begins But as it works its way on in The pain grows stronger...watch it grin, but... [Chorus] A brave man once requested me to answer questions that are key 'can you fix my computer please' and I replied 'oh why ask me?' 'Cause Microsoft is clueless They bring on many changes and I can take or leave it if I please. ...and you can do the same thing if you choose.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
(courtesy of mopslik. Original post.
i saw an early alpha over 2 years ago. I was blown away.
:/ The early alphas were releasable, imo. Especially compared to cmd.exe, which is squarely awful :)
Note that prior to joining MS, i did admin and development work on linux, solaris, irix, and even hp-ux. i know my way around a unix shell pretty well. I started making noise a few years back about how awful cmd.exe is and how we need a real scriptable admin experience. Some people said "go check this out". I was blown away at what they already had.
There are some things about MSH that are really, really good. I'm looking forward to it. I'm frustrated that a lot of the early momentum it had seems to have fizzled and its now bogged down in "product development"
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
I suggest, in turn, that you take off your "ms basher basher" hat, think about what I said and about what you wrote. What you referr to is beta software and beta software that does not ship installed with windows. So, it comes down to the situation that if you need to deal with someone's window box your CLI is still a tiny shell window with what is essentially a castrated version of dos bat.
Bill Gates said "Goodbye" to the Command Line at the introduction of XP. According to him, we did not need it anymore. So Bill, what's up with that?
1. You will need need a passport account. If you do not have one yet, you can sign-up for one at the beta website listed below.
2. Goto http://beta.microsoft.com/
steps removed......
7. Wait for the information to be sent to you through email. (May take a day or two)
8. Once you receive your confirmation email, log back into http://beta.microsoft.com/ for the content
Sweet Jesus - and to think that some people think that Microsoft software is easy to use.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
... they can avoid completely changing it with every new release.
/etc ten years ago are likely still there now, and they likely have the same names. You want to find a log file? First stop is /var/log.
:-)
The one thing I like most about using the unix/linux cli is that the stuff I learned in 1995 (my first encounter with Solaris) is still useful today.
It may be a steep learning curve, but you don't have to throw out everything you know with each new release, the way a GUI often forces you to. If you stick with the command line for a few years, it's an investment that pays off in greater skill.
For example, most config files that were in
Every time a new version of MacOS or Windows comes out, it seems there's always some little check box -- which you need checked to accomplish your task -- that's been moved to some obscure option in a dialog in a control panel that's *different* in every release. Or they've figured out a "better" (read: different) way to do what you need, which means a new control panel, or an entirely new model of doing the same task.
It's like Home Depot (a large warehouse-style hardware/home improvement chain in the US): it took me years to learn where everything was in one of their massive wareshouse stores. Once I learned the layout of the store, it simply wasn't worth my time to shop at a competitor (like Lowes).
Now, of course, Home Depot is remodeling all its stores to be more competitive with Lowes, and thus killing my whole rationale for going there in the first place!
I seem to remember Microsoft's new "scripting" and CLI mentioned before, and descriptions of its powerful features. Basically it was described as object-oriented in architecture with claims of superior technology then!
From the article: Monad was started as a project to provide a more powerful command line competitive with the BASH shell on Unix and Linux, using ideas gleaned from WMIC, but using the .NET Framework as its core component instead.
What concerns me is not Microsoft's improvement of their technology, especially their CLI (as a long time forced-to-use-DOS CLI, believe me, it's long needed the overhaul), but Microsoft's yet another implementation of a primitive that goes against quasi standards, albeit in this case a fairly high level standard.
I wonder why they wouldn't implement a POSIX compliant shell... that would go oh so far to allow portability of apps across platforms. Instead they come up with their idea of CLI.
I know there's always cygwin to handle POSIX scripts, but I find it slow, and difficult to manage effectively in the morass that is Windows. Certainly a POSIX-like interface in Window's CLI would attract more scripters if Microsoft supplied their own native implementation.
Otherwise, what is the motivation? Once again, with Microsoft's leverage and monopoly, it feels like a new "product", that if they can leverage with their monopoly, they continue their assimilation of another niche in the marketplace.
You said:
However, until I actually see it implemented I am regarding it as vapor ware and the latest noise from the MS executives version of WWF trash talk.
The GP merely pointed out that there is a beta implementation available. Therefore, widely-installed or not, it's hardly vapour-ware.
You may have meant "shipped with Windows", but you actually said "implemented".
It's official. Most of you are morons.
i see that some brilliant person modded me as "troll". nice :/
.net objects which can be reflected, you get intellisense on the commandline, like working in visual studio. you dont necessarily have to remember properties and what not from object streams - it infers them for you.
:)
anyway, heres what i thought was cool
- entirely object based. objects are pased via pipeline composition. that means you can do something like
ls | pick name, size | tableout
ls is going to return you a collection of "file" objects. the file object has properties "name" and "size" (and lots of others). the pick command takes each incoming object, and looks for properties called name and size. it then passes down a "new" object that is a bag of the name/size combos (or, it may pass along the original file objects.. i dont remember precisely). finally, tableout is a generic formatter that takes objects and formats them one per row, where each property in the object is displayed in a column.
note that you could replace tableout with say, csvout, or maybe "Excelout"
so the pipe paradigm changes in a way thats pretty cool.
Also, because you're working with
(note that a problem i asked them about when i saw the demo - if you have a pipeline where you want tab completion in stage 3, but stage 1 "modifies" state (i.e. in stage 3 you are reporting on what you deleted in stage 1) how do you get the tab complete info without doing the state change in stage one?.. they were aware of this problem and were thinking about it.. but that was years ago
finally, what was cool is that across MS people are buying into the idea that a commandline shell that manipulated object representations of data in a generic way was going to be the path forward for adminsterting windows. Consider that the IIS metabase is now xml instead of what it used to be.. and that msh is a shell that works on structured objects... its not coincidental.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
The far more appropos MASH reference would be the song "suicide is painless".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Monad is the usual bloated, overly complicated "me too" product Microsoft comes up with. In fact, Monad isn't really even a shell, it's more like Tcl/Tk or perlsh. Linux has nothing to fear from this sort of thing; there are good reasons why everybody still uses the sh family of shells after 30 years despite lots of attempts at "improving" on it.
If Microsoft wanted to come up with a decent shell, they should carefully look at bash and rc, and figure out a minimal set of changes to make it compatible with their non-standard parameter and pathname syntax, and leave it at that. Or they should make careful, incremental changes to the current command interpreter.
I knew there had to be a catch.
They appear to be looking for an identity.
Well, that's what happens when your the McDonalds of operating systems.
Sure it fills you up temporarily but you don't want to make a steady diet of it or it will kill your business.
The same company who has been trying to kill *nix for years, now says they have a better command line shell.
Sure, one that gives hackers more access to OS critical API's I'm sure.
These are the same people who can barely build a microkernel implementation, can't create a multi-user OS in the last 25 years who now, magically, will have a better *nix than *nix.
The market isn't going to buy that. Neither will any of the real analysts.
When I say 'real' analysts, I'm not talking about the C(ZD)-Net type Microsoft Zealots who worship Microsoft and proclaim that every product that comes out of Redmond is G_d's gift to mankind either.
A shell running in a fullscreen console would have no idea which window manager you were running, or in some cases which X server occurrence has priority for things like "themes".
:-)
Also, if X isn't running, using the X clipboard would not be very useful.
There are some features that would be nice to see when a shell program is running in an xterm, but keep in mind that shell programs also have to run in environments which are totally detached from the X server...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
There is an apocryphal story about someone from MKS and an MS flack giving a joint presentation on their UNIX toolkit for Windows.
During the bit about KSH an old guy at the back kept piping up with comments like "that feature wasn't implemented properly" and "that doesn't conform to the specification". Apparently the MS flack expostulated a lot and try to cast doubt on the old guy's qualifications. It was only then that it was pointed to him that the person making the comments was David Korn.
Sounds like Paranoia, the RPG.
This requires RED security clearance.
What is RED security clearance and how do I get it?
Attention, User, you have requested information on a clearance level you are not authorized to know about. Please press the red button to complete your termination. Disobedience is cause for termination. Have a nice day.
bash:
echo $PATH
Monad:
Private Sub echo1_CLI(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As
System.EventArgs) Handles echo1.CLI
Try
AddHandler EchoCL1.PrintLine, AddressOf Me.PrintCL1_PrintLine
PrintLine1.Print(Sys.Init.Windows.PATH)
Catch ex As Exception
Message.Show("An error occurred while printing PATH ", _
ex.ToString())
End Try
anything is possible, it's all just software right ? :)
/etc/passwd | awk -F: '{printf("%s\t%s\n",$1,$5)}'
....
i think the unix model fits unix really well right now, because so much of administration in unix is manipulating text.
Windows never had that - everything was locked away in some opaque object (good and bad, depending on your viewpoint).
The brain behind MSH was one of the WMI guys and he (rightfully so, i think) likes WMI but its too hard to use and too hard to author providers for (his thoughts).
But fundamentally, an inquisitive object based administration system is "good", especially when the underlying stuff is all object based anyhow. the key is to make these objects exposable in a generic, "composable" way, and thats what MSH is attempting to do.
Really, the approaches might be similar. Consider a script i might write to give me the usernames and home directories on my unix box
cat
(apologies if i mis-remembered the field numbers for homedir)
my apology sort of makes the point- administrators are required to understand the internal format of UNIX's text files, and to remember/consult them for tool development.
a comparable approach might be
get users | pick name, homedir | tabout
which is more readable? which is more reesilient to changes in the way users are stored? Does the first example work on NIS+ ? LDap ?
So the goal here is to take the good things about OO (hiding of internal implementation) and the good things about a consistent format (flat text, in unix) and somehow merge them. I'd much rather remember that users have a name and a homedir, than what positions those properties have in one type of user database.
It gets uglier when your text data is working with "cut". For instance, something i'll do from time to time is
ls -l | cut -cX-Y |
where the X-Y range is something i want from the ls -l output. (say filesize). That is hugely problematic - have to tweak the character range until it "seems" right, and what happens when my tty capabilities change (to say, a 20 char tty ?) or, what happens when a file size is larger than the allowed column width? or what happens when ls is an alias to "better ls that auto-sizes columns".
again, something like
get files | pick size | sort
hides this crap from me.
So, actually, i think linux could have a shell that did stuff like this. But what linux lacks is the rich set of objects to hide the implementation details of the things you want to do with linux. when linux has a consistent set of management objects then something like this getspossible.
Of course, windows doesn't have a complete set of management objects either, and besides, we dont have management objects for apps we dont write - you'll surely want to use the same scripts/shellto manage your custom apps. So a important part of msh is the ability for people to author their own object providers that can plug-in to the framework easily.
The make-or-break scenarios for msh, in my opinion are
1) clever ways to promote text,xml, etc into objects for legacy systems
2) objects for a sufficient portion of the management surface to make it worth peoples time to use
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
It's not surprising to me. With my little experience with Linux (I've been using it for about 3 years now) the command line is WAY better than anything Windows has had. The CLI for Windows 98 was terrible. Windows 2000/XP's CLI is a little bit better because they've copied some BASH features, it seems like (like pressing the up or down keys to bring back previously entered commands). However, even the Win2k/XP CLI still has nothing on BASH. The syntax and environment is still crap.
This "shell" has command line input (that is, continuous text that is parsed to determine its meaning and run other executables), yet the communication over "pipes" is in "objects" that have to drag around their methods, so the whole flexibility, simplicity, parsing and isolation of data source from receiver (that, if someone forgot, provides security) go right out of the window. Oh, and it allows to access various system data hierarchies -- too bad, Windows has so many of them.
The whole Unix design is based on the idea of unified file descriptor and a single filesystem tree. Windows still lacks those, and this shell is not even trying to emulate them (like what cygwin does).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Apologizes for the lack of updates. We've been heads down getting things things finished up for some deadlines. We'll be dropping a new version on betapace sometime next week. It is about 95+% language complete and interop with existing external programs has greatly improved. We'd love you (and everyone else) to give it a try and let us know what you don't like or how we can make it better. jps
The article is completely correct when it states that Monad started with the ideas from WMIC and then applied those ideas to .NET. It is however, incorrect to think that this means that WMI is in any way being "left behind".
Of the issues Admins had with WMIC is that to do non-trival processing of WMI object, you had to use XSLT or use WSH (e.g. VBSCRIPT). With Monad, Admins get full, admin-focused, command-oriented, language to manipulate WMI (as well
as .NET, ADO, ADSI, XML and OLE Automation objects).
It might be appropriate to compare and contrast the capabilities of Monad and WMIC but not Monad and WMI. WMI is a management infrastructure, Monad is an environment to present those capabilities via command line scripting.
Said another way, the value of writing new WMI providers (and the value of existing WMI providers) increases with the availability of Monad.
Jeffrey Snover
Monad Architect