Yet another piece of technology originally expected to surface in Longhorn looks as if it won't make it into the product.

The latest element to get the ax is "Monad," aka the Microsoft Shell (MSH) that Microsoft has touted as its alternative to the scripting shells that Unix and Linux programmers know and love.

Microsoft officials have described Monad as the scripting shell for Longhorn and have made public beta versions of the technology available to testers for a couple of years.

One beta tester explained Monad this way: "The idea (behind Monad) is easy: Build a decent, programmable, scriptable shell language/facility. MSH is a combination of the command line abilities of a BASH shell, the richness of a programming language like Perl or Ruby, combined with the rigor and common sense of .NET."

Rumors that Microsoft officially had cut Monad from Longhorn began circulating last week. When asked last week if Monad was still slated to be part of Longhorn, the Windows client team declined to comment. A representative with the Windows Server team said that Microsoft had not committed to a ship vehicle for Monad.

In an interview published on Microsoft's Web site this week to coincide with Microsoft's Tech Ed conference, Senior Vice President Bob Muglia acknowledged Monad won't make it into either Longhorn client or server.

"We are changing the command line environment in Windows using a new object-oriented command line technology, code-named 'Monad,' that will exceed what has been delivered in Linux and Unix for many years," said Muglia in the interview. "It (Monad) will take three to five years to fully develop and deliver."

That three- to five-year period falls outside of when Longhorn is due to ship. Longhorn client is due to ship in the Fall of 2006. Longhorn Server is due out in 2007.

Directions on Microsoft analyst Peter Pawlak said his understanding was that Monad had been slated to be part of R2, the Windows Server release due out later this year, but Microsoft had decided to pull the feature.

Pawlak added: "While I wouldn't be too surprised to hear that Monad won't be in Longhorn client. It is a tool for admins after all. I would be very surprised if it wasn't standard in Longhorn Server. At the recent Microsoft Management Summit, "Microsoft seemed pretty far along with Monad and was talking freely about its capabilities."

Monad isn't completely off the Microsoft radar screen, however. Company officials at Tech Ed confirmed that Microsoft is planning to include Monad in Exchange 12 (E12), the next version of Microsoft's Exchange product due out next year. Microsoft officials had been hinting since December that Monad would debut in E12, but made no claims about Longhorn.

Pawlak said he was aware that Microsoft was planning to add Monad support to E12, but that he also expected it to be part of future Windows releases, as well as other forthcoming Microsoft products.

"Exchange 12's admin user interface (and that of Microsoft Operations Manager v3 and Systems Management Server v4) will be built 'on top of' Monad," Pawlak elaborated. "In this way, everything that an admin can do through the user interface can also be scripted or done via a command line."

(This is an updated version of an article which appeared in the June 2, 2005, issue of the Microsoft Watch newsletter. Want to see what other Microsoft news nuggets you might have missed? Sign up today for a free two-week trial subscription to Microsoft Watch.)