GreySquare Blog

I heard about this Monad while I was browsing for WinFS, The next generation of File System promised by Microsoft(Which I’m unable to obtain till date). Even though the prerequisite WinFX(Yes you need WinFX to Install Monad, Which by the way Includes .NET Framework Beta 2, So uninstall an earlier version if you wish to be in peace) was a big download and took a whopping 120MB for installation I was in no way disappointed. It was a shell in every aspect. It had all the possibilities which I thought were impossible except in a Unix environment. I first tried out the variants of all the Unix shell scripts I had ever written, which was quite a number, And they worked perfectly even in windows(Pardon me for slighting windows but I’m a bit of Unix fan when it comes to the command it offers over the Operating System).Also Monad coins the word “Cmdlet”, which I suppose is an equivalent to wavelet, which are the smallest forms of waves(I guess…). A Cmdlet (pronounced “command-let”) is the smallest unit of functionality in Monad and it is directly analogous the built-in commands in other shells.  In a traditional shell such as CMD.EXE or KSH, commands are executable programs that range from the very simple (such as attrib.exe) to the very complex (such as netsh.exe). With Monad, most commands are very simple and very small, hence the term “command-let” or Cmdlet.

All you need is a few hours with the shell, and you can easily grasp what it was all about and work your way around. It simply had tons of features minus the weird names that only unix can manage to invent. You can even access the windows registry with the Cmdlet provided with the WSH. It was quite easy to get help, provided you know how to get it. I really missed the “man -k anystring” command from Unix which used to be quite handy. But no matter how hard I tried I was NOT able to run a script, This was supposed to be scripting language right? The WSH(Monad Shell a.k.a Windows Shell) would not recognize any of the “.msh” files as scripts. I was frustrated after half an hour of trying and left that for later working.

Verdict: Monad Rocks!!!