Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley reports that ‘Monad’ Scripting Shell Unlikely to Debut in Longhorn. “However, Microsoft is planning to make its alternative to Unix and Linux command-line scripting available as part of Exchange 12, due next year.”
One complaint I hear about Open Source software is the lack of a “roadmap” – a plan with features and ship dates. On the closed source side, no one can claim to know anything about which feature will or will not make it into Longhorn (WinFS? Monad?) but the ship date of “end of 2006” seems pretty firm. However, what value is committing to a ship date without a similar commitment to a feature set?
P.S. If you’re really looking for a bash-like scripting shell for Windows, why not install CygWin and use Bash and an entire UNIX-like environment? Or you might prefer Ruby, if you’re interested in some of the object-oriented features that might (or might not) be in Monad. Both are shipping now, supported now, free, and don’t require you to use Exchange 12. Waiting on Monad is likely to be, well, monadonous.