Jeffrey Snover, the architect of Windows PowerShell, announced today release of V1.0. I've been using PowerShell RC1 for about a month and I'm very amaized. What a great tool it is! All the power of .NET at your fingertips without bogging (re)compilation. Object pipeline is a great idea! I see a lot of application areas in my day-to-day programming tasks (in no particular order):

• Managed code research and investigation
  Get-Member cmdlet is a great way to take a quick pick at class members. You can use -static switch to get a list of static members.
• ETL scripts
  I often found myself in a need of a quick script to extract some data from different sources (text files, web pages, logs, utils output etc.) make some transformation and load this data into SQL Server database. Support of RegExp and object pipeline make this process smooth and easy.
• Ad-hock code testing
  Now if you need to do a quick test to take a look if something is working how you expected it to be, just instantiate an object, fill it's properties and call a method. All this can be done from command line using PowerShell scripting language. It is quite possible to anticipate a new testing framework to apper in the nearest future.
• Database picking
  I use generated NetTiers framework in my .Net web applications. Now I can take my generated DAL and BL assemblies, load them in PowerShell and use BL classes to pick into my DB data or even modify it using command line. Isn't it cool?!
• Application administration
  Nowadays, more and more applications support managed APIs. So it's a prime use for PowerShell to manage those applications!
• Windows monitoring
  Unified access to different Windows datasources (File system, Registry, Event-log, Processes, Varables etc.) makes all those routine tasks to pick into those datasources a snap.

Plus many more uses for other geek stuff. I you haven't tried it, do it now!

PS I use PowerShell Analyzer to write test and run my scripts. A very good tool indeed! It will probably take some time to recompile it for release build of PowerShell.