PowerShell

I haven't seen it announced anywhere yet but it looks like the version 1.0 RC2 installation files for PowerShell/Monad are available thru KB 925228

If you ever plan on using Exchange 2007, you will want to get comfy/familiar with this scripting language. If you want to reduce the size of your VBScripts into scriptlets, you will want to look into this scripting language.

One of my favorite features is being able to traverse the registry as if it were a "drive", much like doing a "cd HKLM/Microsoft"

Edit: It looks like I jumped the gun on the release. The KB article was published to RSS before the actual web links went live, outside of the internal MS 'monad' website. As of 09/27/06, the files do seem to be online correctly.

The official announcement seems to be located here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/powershell/archive/2006/09/26/Windows_PowerShell_RC2_Now_Available.aspx