The goal of the Mandas project is to create a prototype environment for designing, building and managing distributed applications. It is funded by the IBM Centre for Advanced Studies and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and involves researchers from the University of Waterloo, the University of Western Ontario, Queens University, Carleton University, and the University of Saskatchewan. Successful prototypes were demonstrated at both Cascon'95 and Cascon'96, References [14, 15] describe our goals and approaches. Our experimental testbed is a multi-cell DCE environment, the main contributions of our research group focus on providing the infrastructure to monitor and control the execution of distributed applications. We also developed a debugging tool (see [10]) for DCE applications, discussed below.