One of the things that Linux admins say to me is that Linux gives them more control to script specific actions within their environment than Windows does.  So I want to point out some technology that will be arriving in a future version of Windows that will hopefully change that perception.

What I'm talking about is something called Monad and the Monad Shell (MSH).  There are a couple of blog entries here and here that will give you a brief introduction to what Monad is.  In short, Monad is a new command line shell that Microsoft is developing.

There is a great Technet chat transcript available here that answers a lot of the key questions about this technology, but most importantly you probably want to know how you can get your hands on this and try it your self.

To download a preview of Monad technology go to http://beta.microsoft.com/content/bphome.asp. The GuestID is mshPDC.

A quick MSN Search turns up lots of useful information from the microsoft.com and msdn.com domains.

Try it out and let me know what you think.