You also need to ask yourself: Are you doing the right thing?
It's one thing to advocate xargs and wget for crawling a website and pulling down a static archive ... it's another thing to write static xml files and claim you have a SOAP server.
A simple SOAP template example of invoking a PowerShell command remotely via WS-Man (WinRM) ... this is one way you could build a PowerShell remoting client for non-PowerShell platforms.
The Generic Worker framework provides a command-line client, .NET APIs, and a Trident workflow activity to invoke any registered application, with support for automatic transfer of simple parameters and files between desktop and the virtual machine.
geoCron is like cron for location -- it works with Google Latitude to allow you to trigger cron jobs based on your location and send email/sms or trigger web api calls.
This is NOT Lee Holmes book. If anything, it's a pre-requisite to the book, covering the basics such as how to prompt for input, write to the screen, etc. along with some neat tricks like text-to-speech and downloading a web page.