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I just got out of Bob Muglia's keynote speech where he formally announced Windows PowerShell (previously known as Monad). The key things he announced are: Monad (MSH) has a new name: Windows PowerShell Windows PowerShell will RTW (Web download...

One of our primary goals for Monad was to: "Expose the power of .NET in an Admin-friendly way" . The challenges of systems administration are large and growing at the same time organizations are under ever more pressure to reduce costs and do more...

M ost shells (such as Windows CMD.EXE and the UNIX shells SH, KSH, CSH, and BASH) operate by executing a command or utility in a new process, and presenting the results (or errors) to the user as text. Text-based processing is the way in which system...

I strongly encourage people to let us know where we could be doing better and to let us know if we are getting into the weeds. I believe that being open to such bad news is core to the the virtuous cycle of self improvement so such feedback provides opportunities...

Exploring types is a pain! Monad provides Get-Member which makes it pretty nice to explore an OBJECT but if you want to explore that object's type, you have to use the capabilities of the System.RuntimeType class. Let me make that distinction a...

In our newsgroup (Microsoft.Public.Windows.Server.Scripting) , Vasu asked about how match-string works in pipelines: Here is what I observe: 1. MSH C:\> get-alias ..truncated.. Alias ri remove-item Alias rni rename-item ..truncated.. 2. MSH C...

In our newsgroup (Microsoft.Public.Windows.Server.Scripting) , Mark Ayers asked the question: > Shouldn't best practice for scripts be full command name? The answer is YES, NO, and MAYBE. YES - Full names provide the most readable experience...

Kurt asked the question "why not Noun-Verb vs Verb-Noun" in his post: http://blogs.msdn.com/monad/archive/2006/02/16/533522.aspx#574708 There are lots of answers to this some better than others. Let me rattle off a couple of them: VMS DCL/AS400...

Administrators often want to monitor the event logs and look for specific error conditions. The most capable way to do this, of course, is to use a dedicated monitoring application such as Microsoft Operations Manager , or get down-and-dirty with the...

Today I came across http://scripts.readify.net/ . This sight is focused on Monad and MSH and is starting a collection of scripts at: http://scripts.readify.net/Scripts.aspx . You should visit their site and let them know what type of scripts would be...

Monad provides a way to create new com objects with new-object $ie = New-Object -ComObject InternetExplorer.Application $ie.Navigate2( http://blogs.msdn.com/monad ) $ie.Visible=1 Great but what about if you want to bind to an existing object? Where...

MoW, a Monad newsgroup regular, asked why only the Caption, Name and PeakUsage properties were displayed from the command “get-WMIObject Win32_PageFileUsage” while the output object had a lot more properties. I think it is worth it to explain in details...

In Monad, mshsnapins can be installed in a different directory from the Monad executables. At runtime, the Monad engine will load the mshsnapin assembly and its referenced assemblies based on application base information provided during mshsnapin installation...

In this blog I will try to explain different features of sort-object(Sort) cmdlet. For the purpose of this blog, I assume the following objects exist: MSH C:\temp\monad> $a,$b,$c,$d Score Name ----- ---- 100 John 90 Henry 90...

So how come we have three ways to filter a path in most of the core cmdlets such as in the get-item cmdlet. It is important to understand that exclude, include, and filter offer different levels of filtering. So let’s give a few examples of how...

Some applications launch themselves whenever you start your computer and load Windows. In most cases, this is the desired behavior. However in some instances, malicious programs such as spyware, Trojans, worms, viruses load in this manner and hijack your...

Hopefully you've read the previous entries on how to create MshSnapins to include your own cmdlets/providers without having to create an entire separate executable (custom shell). If you didn't or if you did and you don't feel like writing the extra...

In order to prevent a mass usability nightmare with developers picking their own improvised cmdlet verbs, the Monad team, based on customer feedback, decided to enforce the use approved verbs. The idea is to provide a more uniform and consistent...

Tony has a very cool series of Monad-oriented blog entries at: http://mshforfun.blogspot.com/ . I was fascinated by this one: http://mshforfun.blogspot.com/2005/12/ncbi-blastn-under-msh-command-line.html which exposes the NCBI BLAST tool via a command...

In response to the recent Days till Xmas post, applepwc asked the question > where can I find more ".NET types"?I mean is there a list of ".NET type" available in monad? Excellent question but there are a number of aspects to it so let's break it...

As Jeff re y mentioned in an earlier Blog “ Finding which parameters are used the most ” The Monad team is in the process of cleaning up our cmdlets to promote a more consistent user experience . The following two areas which we are focused on might have...

My daughter loves christmas. She often asks me, "how long is it till christmas?" The problem with that is that I'm one of those people that can barely remember what year it is much less the date. Well, it is one thing to be a flawed person and its another...

We are in the process of cleaning up our Cmdlets and ensuring that they are consistent. One of the things we want to do is the ensure that we provide Aliases for ParameterNames. As a general rule, parameternames are not pithy. That is great for reading...

Last time somebody asked for an example of a C# method that took a scriptblock. First of all, there’s one very important thing you have to know about scriptblocks as they are currently implemented. They can’t be invoked outside of a runspace. Any attempt...