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.

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.

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.

When I was first looking for a house, one of my primary constraints was commute times. Before Google and Bing offered commute time estimates, this project helped thousands of people.

Without a doubt, we are blessed here on the Monad team with a community of very talented bloggers. To add another to the list, we are now joined by Karl Prosser. His first few blogs are doosies – integrating Monad with SQL server, and hosting Monad in an interface very similar to SQL’s Query Analyzer. Keep up the great work!  [Edit: Monad has now been renamed to Windows PowerShell. This script or discussion may require slight adjustments before it applies directly to newer builds.

Cryptography is one of the areas about security that many feel is difficult to approach. Encryption, certificates, signatures, public keys, hashing – these are terms that most people like to keep at arm’s length. That is until you’ve read a good introduction to the subject. Although the topic of cryptography is large and very deep, a good introduction easily provides the concepts in which to frame your thoughts and discussion on the subject.

A long time ago, Raymond Chen wrote about how to interact with the ShellWindows COM object using C++. It was doable, but clumsy. He then revisited his post, showing how much easier it was when accessed through a scripting language as its designers had intended. As can be expected, the comments flowed fast and furious in illustration of the conciseness of various languages that the readers were fond of. I’ve been meaning to show the Monad equivalent – not just because it is pithy, but because it is pithy and meaningful.

As their blog has so far failed to point out, it looks like MSN Search pushed a new release live today. Unfortunately, I can’t find any mention anywhere on the internet about what’s new. I very much like the new colour scheme, though. It’s light. It’s fresh. The old blue box made me feel constrained, but the impact goes deeper than that. When I worked on Encarta, there was a MSN-wide effort to move to the white theme.