This morning at the Microsoft Management Summit Microsoft announced that Monad / Microsoft Command Shell has been renamed to Windows PowerShell!  Here's a TG Daily article covering the announcement.  Shell scripts will now use a file extension of .PS1.  The "1" is there for versioning.  That is, if Microsoft decides to make breaking changes they will be able to tell which version of the shell a script expects by the file extension.

 

With this name change, some of the web resources will change.  There will be a new portal page (eventually) at http://www.microsoft.com/powershell.  The team blog will change to http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell.

 

The first release candidate will be made available today at 10 am on the Microsoft Download center:

 

X86 latest build: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=64772&clcid=0x409
X64 latest build: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=64773&clcid=0x409
Documentation: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=64774&clcid=0x409

 

The Windows PowerShell is expected to ship sometime in the fourth quarter of 2006.

 

Since MSH is no longer valid I think we need a new acronym for this shell.  My current favorites are:

 

PS - PowerShell

POSH - POwer SHell

WPS - Windows PowerShell

WIPS - WIndows PowerShell

 

Updated: Apparently the Perl Shell usage of PSH isn't very common and the project isn't very active.

 

What do you think?