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A Guided Tour of the Microsoft Command Shell

Posted by Zonk on from the its-cool-to-have-features dept.

jpkunst writes "Ryan Paul at Ars Technica provides an in-depth, 13 page review of the new Microsoft Command Shell (Monad). (The beta release can be downloaded for free from Microsoft.) From the conclusion: 'Despite my initial skepticism, I am deeply impressed with MSH technology, and I am legitimately excited about the future of the Windows command line.'"

4 of 519 comments (clear)

  1. Another Wise Man Said... by Dante+Shamest · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A witty saying proves nothing.
    - Voltaire

  2. On The Pipe by Murmer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's worth mentioning here that the real strength of the pipe is not "what you can pipe", but "what you can pipe things from, and to", and the fact that you can daisy-chain them together as far as you like. There are literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands of little tools and widgets that you can pipe information into and out of to achieve various effects. Regardless of what new things the MSH pipe can do, the unix world has a significantly larger toolbox.

    --
    Mike Hoye
  3. Re:Who wrote the introduction? by Jugalator · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Are you talking about the new Vista UI?

    In that case, that's a visual style that's changing only the aspects of the UI Windows XP changed. Windows border styles and new flashy button hover effects, etc. Think of it as a different theme/skin, not a way for them to change the UI design guidelines. "OK" will still always be followed by "Cancel", group boxes will still group UI elements with a relation, menus will still be part of the applications and not the dsektop, combo boxes will still be recommended only in "little space" situations, and so on. :-)

    Actually, Microsoft has released preliminary design guidelines for Vista, and I was surprised to see how much can be directly applied, and is even recommended to be applied like that, to Windows XP.

    Also, even in Windows Vista, just like in XP, can you still apply the Windows 2000 look & feel via a flip of a switch. That if anything should show that all they're really doing are mostly just applying new skins to sell their product, and not coming up with new guidelines that indeed would alienate their broad customer base. If I'm at some user that have applied some simple settings, I often lose myself in thinking I'm working on a Windows 2000 workstation when I'm in reality on XP.

    --
    Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
  4. Re:Who wrote the introduction? by SilentChris · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've studied the new UI quite a bit, and you, sir, are clueless.

    Are they keeping things like "OK" and "Cancel? Yes. Are you able to change the look back to Windows 2000 (well, sort of). Yes. They do things like this so people don't need to totally retrain.

    Is the user interface anything like Windows XP, under the hood? No. God no.

    The entire thing has been rewritten from the ground up. Everything is a .NET object, everything inherits from another object. The entire thing is texture based, like OS X.

    What this means is they CAN make drastic changes down the road by simply changing a few objects. Everything will inherit down. Ever notice that buttons can be totally dissimilar from one app to the next, and all MS has been able to do is (for example) but a blue highlight around them? That's because the UI has been so cripped.

    The new UI is simple, beautiful and brilliant. Is it completely different than Windows XP? No. It's not intended to be. The goal, like .NET, is to have a framework to build off for the future. Like .NET, too, the new UI is well-written. I've been programming for it for half a year now and it blows Windows XP out of the water. It even tops OS X in a few areas.