On Saturday at LinuxFest NorthWest, I was approached by someone named Paul who was intererested in writing graphical applications to execute common tasks. I asked for an example, and he mentioned service management of for instance, apache and bind.

So we wrote a small mono app using Glade as the interface designer.
http://colliertech.org/svn/admin/ServiceTool/

Here is a screenshot:
http://colliertech.org/~cjcollier/images/screenshots/ServiceTool.png