Leaving the development aspects aside per Steve's earlier comment...

Why do folks need xp_cmdshell for admin tasks? I definitely have a sense of people's attachment and willingness to use xp_cmdshell despite the fact that it brings with it various persistent and latent security risks. Comments about how using xp_cmdshell makes things simpler or easier just do not compute. Maybe it is because early in my career I ran into more than one mess of a system that heavily leveraged xp_cmdshell where I was asked to rewrite xp_cmdshell out of the system and either consciously or subconsciously made up my mind never to use it in new work. I found other ways to do things without xp_cmdshell that suit me quite well and while the languages have changed the techniques I have developed have come in quite handy in distributed environments where I have to manage more than just a few instances. I think I am being productive, and my scripts tend to scale out to manage n-instances quite easily, but there is always room for improvement. What types of tasks does xp_cmdshell make so much easier? Or reframed, why can't you live without xp_cmdshell?