To be honest, I've never really liked powershell. It's powerful, but in many ways it just feels like a "Bashified" .NET framework.
If I need to script something, I usually use VBScript or JScript using the built-in interpreter; for example, in order to create a proper Console application in VB6, one needs to use the command line LINK.EXE tool to edit the executable so that it is a console program. I made this into a Script because there was some processing that I didn't want to learn how/remember how to do in Batch.
More recently, now that I'm used to C# and .NET, I've found, interestingly enough, C# itself to be a useful scripting language. I merely needed to create a short wrapper application that used the framework to compile the script given on the command line using an appropriate provider (a more recent change was that it now compiles .vb files as VB.NET code). it "cheats" by building a basic class and main method around the "script" code, depending on the language. If all goes well, it merely uses reflection to acquire a reference to the main() routine and runs it using the rest of the passed arguments. Than I just associate an extension to the script "interpreter" and add a item to the system "PathExt" variable and can run C-Sharp scripts by merely typing their base name and passing along the requisite arguments. It sounds more complicated than it is, the core logic is really only a few lines, the rest is idiot-proofing and error checking and ancillary stuff.
This isn't an "ideal" solution but typically if I'm writing a script it's usually of a throwaway nature or is just a passing whim, and I don't really need to distribute it so the fact that my script wrapper program isn't installed elsewhere isn't an issue. Usually my main concern is what I'm trying to do, and being able to do it in a language I am now quite familiar with makes it that much easier.
