The PowerShell is a modern, object-oriented scripting envrironment for Windows XP, Vista and 7. I'm trying the PowerShell for a few days and found that it is really well-organized. I also feel that the PowerShell assembles good points from C#, Visual Basic, Haskell and Perl. Although its syntax is a little complicated, the PowerShell has possibility to replace not only the old-fashioned "batch" files, but also the VBScripts and the JScripts.

It runs on Windows XP (I'm not using XP already, but it has a big meaning to support it), has no need to parse String manually, and is free --- enough to make me feel that I never want to write batch files any more.