fellow pro or amateur sysadmins, rejoice with the power of Monad!

The latest .NET show is Longhorn Fundamentals.  While the initial chunk (in Technobabble) is pretty interesting, the Monad demos (in Enter the Programmer) are killer.

I can't overstate how many seemingly millions of hours of admin work (I did large-scale AFS, AIX, Linux, etc. administration in former lives) Monad would have saved me.  Tons of perl, of course, but more so awk '{print $6}' and cut -c48-52 and egrep -i “foo|bar“ and the like.

I think any technology should be judged at some level by the “play metric” - when you first see it demo'd, how much you want to turn around and spend the next X hours/days playing around with it.  C# had a very high play metric for me.  Monad just about blows the roof off my play metric scale.

There's so much poor communication between chunks of code in the world of a sysadmin - XML helps to an extent, but Monad helps break down those walls almost completely.  Robert starts talking about (around 1:31:00 mark) the unix-ish world that can arise in .NET land thanks to Monad - lots of tools that can “do one thing, and do it well”, each integrating with the other in simple ways with the vast majority of the plumbing being off-loaded to Monad and the framework.

Anyway, go check out the presentation, get some bits (they talk about the betaplace around 1:35:00), go forth and play!  Now I get to go spend the weekend at the beach and watch my sister-in-law get married. :)