Jeffrey Snover - Monad explained

this guy is a genius

This sounds really, really interesting.

In the middle of the video, before I would forget to do so, I ran off to BetaPlace (whose URL is not betaplace.com, but http://beta.microsoft.com, and has been for quite some time now) and filled in the survey.

I'm very curious on how this'll turn out.

knew Monad from quite a while. In fack I first hear about it in the .Net Show. There was a little segement about Monad in this episode : http://www.msdn.microsoft.com/theshow/Episode043/default.asp

with good demos. If you can't wait until monday, go watch that one. By the way, I try Monad and it's very cool.

That sounds very cool. Is there a solution for automation that doesn't require the command line though? Sort of like http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/automator.html

>Is there a solution for automation that doesn't require the command line?
Yup.  Cmdlets are .NET classes which are hosted by Monad.  Monad then surfaces that class as a Command line interface, an API, and eventually a WS-Management Web Service.

We surface the cmdlets as an API for management applications and to support rich GUIs. Both of these need very low latency access.

jps

jsnover wrote:

>Is there a solution for automation that doesn't require the command line?
Yup.  Cmdlets are .NET classes which are hosted by Monad.  Monad then surfaces that class as a Command line interface, an API, and eventually a WS-Management Web Service.

We surface the cmdlets as an API for management applications and to support rich GUIs. Both of these need very low latency access.

jps

Sorry I may have missed that in the video, the WMV quality on OSX is *very* poor

Looks interesting, time to try out that beta - sure I've got some windows boxen around here somewhere.

Excellent work!  One question:

I struggled for a long time trying to figure out what was required to make SQL Server integrated security work between two computers.  Was it a Windows login issue, a SQL issue or some sort of Windows privileges issue.  Even after getting things to work I still don't know what "events" go on when one machine connects to another.

Can Monad help me see those sort of links in the chain?

He said that you can sign up and the next day get it...this isn't exactly the case.  I signed up and got access a few months later.  It's well worth it though, a VERY interesting product.  It still has a few problems with perf (serializing as XML), and consistancy ("dir | get-member" returns members of the items IN the array, not OF the array), but nothing that wont get resolved.

He's not kidding about how easy it is to use compared to UNIX shells, and even more powerful IMO.

Thank you, thank you, thank you! This sounds amazing and I can't wait to try it! Great video!

Cameron
-www.msinbox.com

If you guys missed it in the video the Guest ID at BetaPlace to get Monad is: mshPDC
It is case sensitive.

It is great stuff.  Have been in the beta for some time now and just installed the new build and have been playing more with it.  Cmdlets and providers will really help admins create useful automation and management tools.
--
wjs, mvp

You have witnessed the strength of right-brain dominant thinking. This Monad guy is trying to synthesize admin' experiences from various systems under one context.

This is an attempt to assert dominion over the mindset of each organization that produced each admin' experience. This activity is often met with hostility from the very kind of people this product is ironically named after: the monads.

Most of us assume we are inidividuals but more often than not most obedient employees are monads.

Does anyone have a screenshot of Monad in action, seeing as how there are a few people already lucky enough to be beta testing it?!

mlauzon wrote:

Does anyone have a screenshot of Monad in action, seeing as how there are a few people already lucky enough to be beta testing it?!

There will be a demo video posted soon.

This is ridiculously cool. But one thing I've always wondered about these technologies that will be released a long time from now, as .Net 2.0 is still under development, do you guys still take advantage of any of the new framework and/or language enhancements? For example, do you guys refactor the Monad source to make use of C# Generics or Anonymous methods?

Thanks.

jsnover wrote:

mlauzon wrote: Does anyone have a screenshot of Monad in action, seeing as how there are a few people already lucky enough to be beta testing it?!

There will be a demo video posted soon.

I'll be waiting for it, although I wouldn't mind getting my hands on a copy to beta test...yes I've done the survey.

i'm excited to see how this works.  I signed up today and lets hope it only takes 24/48hours to get in!

Sorry for the delay in getting the demo up. It'll be up later today.

How well does this integrate with ms-build?  Will I still have to learn  one system for build files and another system for shell-scripts?

MSH is truly awesome technology. With a pretty open beta, an amazing beta newsgroup (with some really deep thining), a highly responsive dev team, an architect with a sense of humour, not to mention some intellectual underpinning, etc, etc, etc, what's not to like? 

There is now a MSH Wiki on Channel9.  Head off to:
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.MSHWiki

I think Mondad sounds splendid and I am very excited to see the command line interface evolving into something more powerful.

However, in the video Jefferey claims that MSH is more programmatic than Perl, Python and Ruby. I'd be interested to know what are the features that make MSH more programmatic than those languages? Did Jefferey have particular MSH language features in mind when he made that comment?

Balclutha wrote:

I think Mondad sounds splendid and I am very excited to see the command line interface evolving into something more powerful.

However, in the video Jefferey claims that MSH is more programmatic than Perl, Python and Ruby. I'd be interested to know what are the features that make MSH more programmatic than those languages? Did Jefferey have particular MSH language features in mind when he made that comment?

You can use any .NET language to create MSH components

Do you expect there to be a better solution for remote management via the command line or Monad?  Nix having the SSH it would be nice to see something comparable in windows other than the telnet service.

can you email me when the demo is posted?... Ive been groaning for years that the cmd (COMMAND!!!) is lame on windows... WSH, BAT files yuck... AND the fact that half the windows binaries dont pipe or redirect properly anyway or have unpredictable results!

The true geek in me came out watching this vid - so much so that I can see how ive modelled a lot of this in applications to accomodate just what Jef is talking about - process mapping with defined inputs and outputs that can be interogated - ... im such a geek!

Anthony.

JakeDAHS wrote:

Do you expect there to be a better solution for remote management via the command line or Monad?  Nix having the SSH it would be nice to see something comparable in windows other than the telnet service.

All SSH is, is a telnet service wrapped in an SSL tunnel.  If Windows came out with an OpenSSL analogue, then what you suggest would be trivial.

Maurits wrote:

All SSH is, is a telnet service wrapped in an SSL tunnel.  If Windows came out with an OpenSSL analogue, then what you suggest would be trivial.

I'm sorry, but that is not correct. I have made this assumption before, but I was corrected, too. SSH is not SSL+Telnet. SSH does not "speak" SSL, and they cannot talk to each other. There is, however, some overlap in how they accomplish some similar goals.

http://www.rpatrick.com/tech/ssh-ssl/
http://www.snailbook.com/faq/ssl.auto.html

Facilitating the programming learning curve should be fun!!