Actually, Microsoft's strategy at this stage is pretty straight-forward. They are going to be replacing (over time) WSH with MSH, the Microsoft Shell, code-named Monad. Monad was one of the technologies that Microsoft previewed around the time that .NET 2.0 BETA 1 timeframe.

The shell hosts the .NET runtime and uses a series of "cmdlets" to encapsulate the various functions that you can perform with the system. Cmdlets have meaningful names like "get-process" and "eat-steak" where the pattern [verb]-[noun] is actually baked into the programming model.

One of the big differences over existing shells like bash is that when piping from one cmdlet to another you don't just pass text, you actually pass .NET object instances (this is largely transparent) which means you don't loose information and you don't have to deal with nasty text parsing routines which always made script programming a bit of a nightmare.

All in all I think that administrative script programming is going to get easier, especially since Cmdlets and their capabilities can be discovered dynamically (its not hidden away in an EXE, its exposed as meta-data), so we will find editors that allow you to build pipelines to perform processing.

Timeframe wise, I would expect this stuff to be out after Whidbey (.NET 2.0) ships but before Longhorn ships - but you never can tell. If you want to know more about the practical aspects of Monad you can check out this video with Jeffrey Snover over at Channel9.

http://shrinkster.com/41i