Monad (AKA PowerShell)

Chapter 1. Introducing MSH

Monad, also known more formally as the MSH Command Shell, is a next generation Windows command shell. Built on top of the .NET Framework, MSH provides a powerful infrastructure for the automation of a wide range of administrative tasks. At last, the command line is a first-class citizen in the world of Windows system management.

It would be unfair to characterize MSH as simply an evolution of the cmd.exe shell, a system whose roots reach back to the days of MS-DOS and before. Indeed, although the standard “host” of MSH is a console application, MSH is designed so that it can be used in other contexts, such as the MMC (Microsoft Management Console). This new shell is built from the ground up with a focus on structured data and today’s administrative challenges.

The pipeline, a mechanism for passing data between different functional units, has long been a feature of many shells, including cmd.exe. MSH goes beyond the traditional notion of using text to pass data between the different stages of the pipeline and all of the “prayer-based parsing” that goes with it by allowing the transfer of structured data in the form of .NET objects between the pipeline elements. This self-describing information can be used at any point in a complex sequence and allows any process to operate on data in an intelligent fashion, even pipeline elements that have never seen a given type of data before.

MSH also uses a provider model so that the many types of hierarchical data stores ...