Indianapolis (IN) - The latest rendition of what Microsoft is now describing as the command line interface for Longhorn, as well as the successor to the old DOS command line, will be publicly demonstrated by Microsoft software architect Jeffrey Snover tomorrow at TechEd in Orlando.

The Monad shell (MSH) was designed in response to growing demands from administrators for a command line tool on the order of the BASH shell used by Linux and Unix administrators. Tom's Hardware Guide was given an exclusive advance look at the content of Friday's demonstration. As Snover told us, his favorite element of Monad is its "three cascading user experiences," which he characterized as operator mode for DOS-style commands, simple scripting mode (similar to bash and ksh scripts), and sophisticated scripting on the order of Perl, Python, and Lisp.

The examples we have seen are similar in phraseology to Microsoft's C# language, which is now widely used in systems software and Web services development, and has become one of the .NET framework's primary languages. As Snover describes, these different modes make the Monad experience as simple or as complex as the administrator may require.

In previous demonstrations of earlier versions of Monad, Snover described its key objective as enabling 100 percent of administrator functions through the command line. So conceivably, a Windows Server administrator will be able to manage an entire enterprise without ever touching a GUI. This could completely rewrite the way future Windows Server administrators are trained, certified, and qualified.

The current beta of Monad will be released next week, said Snover, to developers invited by Microsoft. The key addition to the new beta, he told us - which will be seen for the first time at TechEd - is its support for OLE Automation. This is the system which makes aspects of running Windows applications, such as Office apps, addressable through terms accessed through type libraries. Conceivably, a Monad script or function will be able to access specific components or aspects of running programs by name; for example, the third grammatical error in the active Word document, or a block of x by y cells in the current Excel spreadsheet.

The syntax of Monad commands will be defined by a simple verb-noun syntax, such as "stop-process," "get-member," and "format-table." Scripts may be written in advance or entered interactively using a conversational-style parser, similar to the Immediate Window in Microsoft Visual Basic. This way, the results of commands can be "remembered" through symbolic objects, which can be addressed in successive commands. This also enables large sets of results to be addressed symbolically, both as a set and as a group of individual members, particularly with new constructs such as "foreach," which addresses members of a set that meet given criteria.

As with object-oriented programming languages, addressable objects in Monad will have object-like characteristics, such as properties and exclusive methods. So for instance, a command might be able to isolate all members shown in Active Directory who are not privileged to use resources in a particular domain. Those members would be represented in an internal table in memory, as objects. The admin could then enable a "foreach" construct to grant limited privileges based on given criteria.

In April, in a Microsoft press conference, it was stated that the first public edition of Monad will be shipped with Exchange 12, which is due in the second half of 2006. Since Longhorn is also due at that time, fresh information regarding Monad's public release may also come on Friday.