I used to be a hard-core Microsoft/Windows developer; in fact, I used to work for Microsoft! I was stuck in the Visual Studio sandbox and addicted to graphical tools. It has been a very slow transition, but I'm now addicted to my shell. If you are stuck on Windows, you should force yourself to learn and use PowerShell. And at home, you should install a Unix and force yourself to learn Bash. You'll thank me later.
I mean, I'm a Unix guy so... I know bash. I don't really want to touch PowerShell or C# or .Net or anything of the kind (at work, the first thing I do is start up a Linux VM), but it's interesting to know that there is a way to treat the Windows registry as a filesystem.