You really think that wait 2+ years for longhorn is an acceptable answer ?

Uhh, great point! ;) No, you're right it's definitely not a good solution for those people who want a rich scripting environment today.

Truthfully, I don't understand why MSH *needs* Longhorn. I can't imagine it relies on anything outside of CLR technology. Thus, it's more likely it needs Whidbey. Maybe if someone from the MSH team catches wind of this they can leave a comment.

What they told us during the management session at the pdc ( http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC2003/ARC/ARC334.htm ) was that they were hoping to also release it for XP and Windows Server 2003. The link is in case I mangled the quote. The best answer I can tell you is that it's not currently supported, meaning all filed bug reports would not be as useful as longhorn reports at their current testing stage. Drew, you beat me to the response; I was waiting till I took lunch before responding.

Yes, I did feel that at the very least, MSH allows the scripters to get a hold of the richness of .NET, but MS's true goal, at least from the presentation was to have the admins/scripters "glide" to learning the full .net platform (/ ide / languages) by way of MSH. As I am not an MS employee, you can take my perspective with a grain of salt, but at the very least die-hard scripters with no desire to learn any event-driven or true OOP models can work with the monads (commandlets/providers) developed by ms and/or third party developers. (I'm sure sysinternals will have a section in the future for things like this).

^_^,Pretty Good!