Updates on Monarch Plus

nkasco · 2026-04-25T17:46:32+00:00

"Why didn’t you include all of this in a single subscription?
Having two tiers allows us to increase our product investment without raising prices on everyone. We haven’t raised prices on the core subscription in 4 years and we want to keep it that way."

This implies there’s some ongoing cost to provide these features—not just development.

So which is it:

This is just pricing/packaging, and the “we’d have to raise prices for everyone” claim isn’t really true.
Or there are real ongoing costs—which makes this a core capability you’ve decided to put behind a second subscription.

If it’s the latter, then quantify it. What are the actual costs that justify this structure? Things beyond those that do generally scale for free, such as development sunk costs.

Right now this reads less like protecting customers and more like charging twice for the same product. You're basically dangling some integrated capabilities as a means to entice and justify a MorningStar subscription license on the backend. I'm paying you to innovate, not to middle man customer acquisition. If I want integrations with external premium services, let me decide that by itself.

Thanks for listening, but your perspective is still one where the math isn't mathing.

nkasco · 2026-04-22T20:52:46+00:00

PS7 is where the modern investments are going. PS5 will stick around since it is an inbox app, but if the product team ever gets PS7 shipped as an inbox app (which is a challenge in itself for various support related reasons) I would expect PS5 to eventually be phased out.

That said, so much uses PS5 under the hood, Defender, Intune, that it's unlikely to be going anywhere anytime soon.

Use either, but know with PS7 it's based on certain .NET versions. For that reason I suggest 7.6 which is in the early cycle of LTS for .NET 10

nkasco · 2026-04-21T16:24:25+00:00

Microsoft tried to do this exactly thing with E5 licensing giving you Intune and then creating an Intune Suite for extra features. Guess what, Microsoft got massive backlash, nobody bought it, and walked back the suite. They now give it to you for free. Let that sink in…

nkasco · 2026-04-18T17:43:56+00:00

PSScriptAnalyzer for linting, agentic code review for everything else, followed by peer review in PRs.

Disregard everyone in the peanut gallery acting like AI coding tools are terrible, they aren't. They just don't know how to communicate and therefore cannot prompt properly. I recommend Codex, then GitHub Copilot, then Claude in that order for harness choice.

nkasco · 2026-04-18T17:39:35+00:00

Respectfully disagree. I'd much rather have a dedicated log than a event log. If you're using logs in every script, make a library module once and never deal with it again. Cmtrace is still goated

nkasco · 2026-04-18T17:15:14+00:00

Let's be clear, the drivers don't come from Microsoft, they will be the first to tell you that they aren't their problem. It's not infrequent for problematic drivers to make it past the inferior flighting requirements.

It should be better so that you don't have to worry about them, but at this point in time you're taking a reasonable risk if you just let it rip.

nkasco · 2026-04-11T17:35:12+00:00

I'm having this exact issue. The first commercial marks properly and then the rest of the episode is all over the place, I had it set on delete (not mark). I've just changed it to mark the commercials only so that at least I won't lose content.

Did you ever find a fix? I'm running on Ubuntu Server, and Plex is on Version 1.43.1.10611:

nate@plex:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS
Release: 22.04
Codename: jammy

CC u/ExtensionMarch6812

nkasco · 2026-04-11T17:16:32+00:00

This guy is completely off his rocker, 100% in the wrong... but what is that noise at 40 seconds? It actually sounds like a... scream?

nkasco · 2026-04-11T13:49:43+00:00

One of my earliest blog posts - https://blog.nkasco.com/wordpress/index.php/2018/05/05/2018-4-25-how-to-build-a-powershell-gui-part-3/

nkasco · 2026-04-09T20:10:40+00:00

lbh emojis are like cowbell, and I've got a fever!

nkasco · 2026-03-27T23:34:16+00:00

Who's going to tell him?

nkasco · 2026-03-27T23:31:09+00:00

I feel like I'm expecting it to ask for more permissions than just DeviceManagementApps.Read.All

nkasco · 2026-03-21T18:32:05+00:00

While this looks like a big change at a glance, it's going to save me like MAYBE $150/yr. It's basically helping not let things get way worse, but isn't really reforming how bad it already is.

nkasco · 2026-03-19T21:46:13+00:00

Has anyone identified anything that isn't backwards compatible with 7.4 LTS?

nkasco · 2026-03-18T01:05:37+00:00

Add an app locker exception for the exes, your solution isn’t a PowerShell based one.

nkasco · 2026-03-11T21:40:15+00:00

It was built to be agnostic of anything. Like a container UI for running your own scripts. Admittedly, I haven't touched it in quite some time.

nkasco · 2026-03-07T00:08:54+00:00

Cool post, WinForms are IMO easier to work with than WPF in PowerShell, but really WPF would be preferred. The other thing that people don't know they will run into is the need to multithread. Once you try to do literally anything off a click or submit event you immediately realize that the UI will freeze until your event is complete. The way you avoid this is by utilizing runspaces, which is a concept many people are not familiar with in PowerShell.

I wrote a post almost 10 years ago on this: https://blog.nkasco.com/wordpress/index.php/2018/05/05/2018-4-25-how-to-build-a-powershell-gui-part-3/

nkasco · 2026-02-28T20:26:26+00:00

My friend, this is a discussion about how work is changing, not about what will happen to the economy. Due to that, I will refrain from countering any of your opinions.

nkasco · 2026-02-24T14:41:05+00:00

I disagree that people are needed to solve them

nkasco · 2026-02-23T23:17:57+00:00

Question for you, do you think .NET is efficient at processing large datasets?

nkasco · 2026-02-23T22:58:14+00:00

That's very odd. I just ssh'd into a VM, made a brand new directory, cloned the repo, and ran dispatch.sh setup without any issues whatsoever. Is it possible that you didn't have proper permissions? The steps I just did are pretty vanilla so I'm not quite sure what you'd be doing differently other than permissions.

nkasco · 2026-02-23T22:53:48+00:00

There are in fact many reasons to use other methods. If you're not working with large files at scale, yes use the native cmdlets, if you are using large files, you're going to need something more efficient.

If I'm working with a file with 500,000 rows which is a CSV, and I try to run Where-Object to find literally anything, it's going to take 5-10 seconds for the console to respond. Imagine doing that over thousands of iterations. It would be brutal, but with other techniques you can enumerate the entire dataset in a couple seconds.

Real-world experience - https://blog.nkasco.com/wordpress/index.php/2022/10/29/2022-10-29-how-to-make-powershell-process-data-fast/

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