Rem: Blazing a New Frontier with Monad

I attended the Fall 2003 Windows & .NET Magazine Connections Conference, and during his keynote address, Mark Minasi talked about a new Microsoft scripting environment. According to Minasi, Microsoft is working on a new systems administration scripting environment, code-named Monad, that will be part of Longhorn. Can you provide more information?

At the 2003 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft announced and demonstrated many new Longhorn technologies, including Monad. Although I can't provide any more information than what was presented at PDC, I'll recap the technology preview and point you to resources where you can get more information.

Monad is a new administration scripting and automation solution for Longhorn. Although the technology is roughly 2 years away from being released, Monad appears to be Microsoft's long-awaited comprehensive, consistent, and unified systems administration model designed from the ground up for Windows IT professionals. From what I can tell, Monad will be the technology through which Microsoft and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) will enable their Windows applications to be managed from the command line and automated using shell scripts. . . .