Windows “Monad” Shell Beta 2 upgrade problems

30 Dec 2005 - Dave

Picked up the new O’Reilly book on Monad. After reading a few pages I started the older rev of Monad to work along with the book. Monad started with a bunch of errors and died.

In Add/Remove Programs there were four dot.net libraries–

• v1.0
• v1.1
• v2 Beta 2
• v2 release version

v2 Beta 2 was installed to support Monad initially. It worked fine at the time. Since then the release v2 was installed for another application. I couldn’t remember running Monad since installing the release version so it seemed logical that might have broken something. So v2 Beta 2 was uninstalled.
Since the book referenced Monad Beta 2, I downloaded the latest rev of Monad. When the new Monad was started it produced this error:

CLR Error: 80004005

Googling the error and searching Microsoft’s website didn’t produce a solution. The 80004005 error was frequently seen with database access and appeared to be related to security access. None of the suggestions helped.

This process worked though:

1. Uninstalling the dot.net v2 Beta 2 runtime
2. Reinstalling the dot.net v2 release version

I can work along with the book now.

What is so good about Monad?

• Up until now the Microsoft command lines were very weak compared to those available in Unix
• A good command line processor allows you to automate tasks in ways that are impossible from a GUI (graphic user interface)
• While there are more powerful command line processors available for Windows (like Cygwin) they are a bolt-on that feels more like Unix/Linux than Windows
• Of the great things about the Unix/Linux command line processors is the ability to pipe the output of one command as text input for another command. Monad can do this as well as piping structured data or objects from one command to another.

A couple negatives about Monad–

• Monad is a Windows-only tool. It is deeply integrated with the Windows platforms
• There is a growing acceptance of scripting languages like Perl, Python and Ruby. These languages compete with Monad. As programming languages they are more mature and have a wide user base. And these three scripting languages have implementations on most operating systems.