One of the tasks that I perform regularly for the family farm is to update our cattle movement details on the British Cattle Movements Service (BCMS) web site. Although I manage the herd records using my own software (written over a number of years to match the way I work, but never published), I've never got around to automating the process of updating our records on BCMS.
Buried amongst the avalanche of software being released by Microsoft at the moment is a piece of software called Powershell. Its a replacement for the venerable DOS command line, providing all of its abilities and much more besides, its actually more akin to the power available from a UNIX/Linux command console than DOS but then I think that's where the inspiration comes from.