While I signed up for the original Monad public beta, I never really gave it more than a cursory look: It seemed really incomplete and unpolished. It also irked me somewhat that Microsoft couldn't just embrace one of the existing scripting languages -- say python or perl -- even if they were invented elsewhere, but had to go and invent something new (although I've grudgingly come to appreciate their reasoning).
In mid-October it came out in release form, having been renamed PowerShell.
I've finally got a chance to try to incorporate it, and thus far it looks very nice. While this isn't something that you're going to build a product upon, good automation scripts are instrumental in good development practices, eliminating inefficiency, and the morale-suckage that goes along with repetitive, manual tasks, but more importantly eliminating the inevitable error when people are given such tasks.
It's well worth a close look for automation scripts on the Windows platform. Certainly beats .bat.
Reading through the documentation, however, the following gave me a good chuckle.
One major advantage of using objects is that it makes it much easier to pipeline command, that is, to pass the output of one command to another command as input...
...Windows PowerShell provides a new interactive model that is based on objects, rather than text...
...In the following example, the result of an IpConfig command is passed to a Findstr command. The pipeline operator (|) sends the result of the command on its left to the command on its right. In Microsoft® Windows® PowerShell, you don't need to manipulate strings or calculate data offsets...
PS> ipconfig | findstr "Address"
Ah...good stuff.
Of course in that case the vaunted example isn't using objects (well I suppose the result is a set of string objects, but the example makes no use of them, and completely fails to convince as to the difference), it's just using the stdout of ipconfig, and that command of course works in a classic cmd.exe (or even command.com) session.
Of course some people are surprized that Windows has any command line functionality. In the examples for PureJPEG
