A me Monad entusiasma molto... dategli
un'occhiata!!!
Chissà se ce la fanno in tempo per Vista... o se lo installeremo dopo... 
John Udell, columnist at InfoWorld, has a very positive review of Monad, Microsoft's upcoming scripting shell:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/categories/infoworld/2004/11/02.html#a1106
"MSH is quirky, complex, delightful, and utterly addictive. You can, for example, convert objects to and from XML so that programs that don't natively speak .Net can have a crack at them. There's SQL-like sorting and grouping. You write ad hoc extensions in a built-in scripting language that feels vaguely Perlish. For more permanent extensions, called cmdlets, you use .Net languages.
With MSH, Windows system administration manages to be both fun and productive. And the story will only improve as the .Net Framework continues to enfold Windows' management APIs. Competitors take note: Windows is about to convert one of its great weaknesses into a strength."
A MSDN web-cast with Jeffrey Snover, MONAD architect, shows this in action.
Ready to try it out? You can download the Beta 2 bits here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=2AC59B30-5A44-4782-B0B7-79FE2EFD1280&displaylang=en.
It will run on Windows XP SP2 and Windows 2003. You'll also need the
.NET 2.0 framework.