As pointed out by Scott Hanselman, somehow – my get-answer script is being used as cudgel in a
Monad vs Ruby debate.  Ted Neward mentions how cool the script is (with a title bound to
stir Ruby natives.) Glenn Vanderburg, in kind, jumps to Ruby’s defense.

As far as the language goes, Glenn’s main point is that Ruby is much more concise than Monad.

This is where the title of my post comes from – it’s easy to win any contest if you’re the
only one competing in it :)  I write my aricles with a heavy prejudice towards teaching,
illustration, and explanation.  Without that style, the Monad script can be written in a form
that is nearly line-for-line equivalent to the Ruby example:

Exchange has been taking significant heat from beta customers that neither it (nor Monad) align strongly with the Windows Live corporate strategy.  This is blocking adoption by many customers, especially those accustomed to the new Windows Live Mail (Kahuna) interface.

This change brings some of that branding synergy into the get-childitem cmdlet.

You can get a prototype of this new functionality here: dir-live.msh.txt (7.23 KB).  Rename to “dir-LIVE.msh” after downloading.  This is a breaking change, so please provide us with your feedback.

One of the scripts I like the most in my toolbox is the one that gives me answers to questions from the command line.

For the past 2 years or so, Encarta has offered an extremely useful “Instant Answers” feature.  It’s since been integrated into MSN Search, as well as a wildly popular Chat Bot.  MoW showed how to use that feature through a Monad IM interface (via the Conversagent bot,) but we can do a great job with good ol’ screen scraping.

Scott Hanselman and Carl Franklin talked at length about Monad today in the HanselMinutes podcast.  It’s very flattering coverage, and hits a lot of the “WOW” points that differentiate Monad from traditional shells.

Thanks to Keith for pointing the newsgroups to this, and for introducing Scott to Monad in the first place.

Good job, Scott, and welcome to the family :)

[Edit: Monad has now been renamed to Windows PowerShell. This script or discussion may require slight adjustments before it applies directly to newer builds.]

Today marks the first day of Spring – a date often hailed often as one with equal amounts of night and day.  This is untrue because most of us live somewhere other than the equator, because the Sun is larger than an idealized geometric point, and because our atmosphere causes refraction.  Truthfully, it is more of an Astronomical and geometric novelty than it is a practical one.

It’s still an interesting geometric novelty, though.  According to Wikipedia, the Vernal Equinox falls at 18:26 UTC.  Here’s a little trick to let you find that in your local timezone:

I’m excited to announce that we recently added Monad to the list of supported products on the Microsoft Connect site – http://connect.microsoft.com.

On the Monad team, we pride ourselves in listening to customer feedback.  We used the BetaPlace feedback system in the past, and the Connect site now makes the process much more efficient.  This is especially true in helping us determine the magnitude of a given problem, or desire for a feature request.

Peter Provost unearthed this site the other day, and it’s really great. It’s called “Ian’s Shoelace Site,” and he’s got lots of cool things to do with your laces.  That’s all well and good if you are a knot fiend, but he’s also got two very practical knots:

• “Ian’s Knot” – Your standard shoelace bow, but a heck of a lot faster:
  http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm
• “Ian’s Secure Knot” – A secure knot that both looks cool, and keeps even the most slippery laces in place.
  http://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm

Believe it or not, my daughter and I spent Sunday afternoon tying our shoes!

This is just a simple MP3 to play an A440 test tune. Loop it in your media player, and tune your instrument!

This question has come up several times internally, so I thought I’d post my answer for posterity.  “My customer would like Monad training – are there any courses avialable?”

Usually, these customers are looking for a good introduction to Monad – and not really training on the scripting language or development.  The best thing is probably to introduce them to our 2 recorded Live meetings:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032277851&CountryCode=US
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032277853&CountryCode=US

If you want to really make it a hands-on experience, you could ensure that everybody has Monad installed on their machine, and watch these webcasts together.  That way, you can play with it as you learn about it.

The Monad community is vibrant, and loves to write stuff.  Even better, is that they love to share that stuff.  Sometimes, even with source code.  Jeff’s JaMSH is one example of a project that has shared its source code, and Karl seems to have intentions to share the source for his MshAnalyzer.  Taken even broader, several of our resident newsgroup gurus have been bantering around the idea to create a shared workspace for MSH extensions – likely to be called “Community Extensions for MSH.”