You must read between the lines, but that what it seems. They call it ATLAS, and it combines a .NET-based API with a client-side javascript library. And the team wants feedback as they do their semi-weekly public releases leading up to 1.0. Interesting times, as always.

For the record, this is cool because it brings AJAX voodoo into the nice, friendly, standardized Visual Studio IDE and the nice, clean, modern, OO .NET languages and the nifty, mostly-standards-based .NET technologies.

September 16th, 2005 | .NET, Microsoft, Transparency | 2 comments

The self-dubbed “Swiss Army Knife of Admin Tools” that Microsoft, for reasons which I am very curious about, has code-named Monad, seems quite the little bag of tricks. It’s a command shell, it’s a scripting language, it’s a strongly-typed object-oriented .NET language, it’s interpreted, it’s dynamic, it’s scriptable, it’s a bird, plane, a bit of cheese, and your dessert.

Now, as to the name, all I might wager is this. Objects know their states, and the states of others, better than the text that current command lines must parse in order to pipe and slice. This makes the user the Chief Monad of the system, arranging objects into a pre-existing harmony of computery goodness. Eat it, Voltaire.

August 16th, 2005 | .NET, Language, Philosophy | No comments