Script automation with SSH in Windows

I am testing a monitoring software, like the most monitoring software, it  relies on SSH to call remote customized scripts. But it is running on Windows. To get SSH command line working nicely in Windows is not quite easy.
There are two options to use SSH to do script automation in Windows.
1.Use SSH command line
2.Use SSH API for a scripting language i.e. Perl
 Use SSH command line
PuTTY is a well-known SSH GUI client,the non-interactive, command line interface is plink
The other option of SSH command line is ssh in cygwin, this ssh works exactly the same way as ssh in Linux.
SSH in cygwin support more features than plink, but it requires installing the whole cygwin environment, while plink is just a single binary file.
However plink has a draw back, it seems there is no way to suppress the “accept remote host key prompt” and its host key cache is stored in Windows registry.
SSH in cygwin can suppress the prompt by setting “-o stricthostkeychecking=no” and the host key cache is stored in .ssh in user's home folder. If the monitoring software is running as a service under 'local system account', where is the .ssh located? The answer for Windows 2008 R2 is “c:\Windows\SysWOW64\config\systemprofile”, you have to create “.ssh”  folder manually, otherwise the service can't save the ssh host key cache.
 Use SSH API for a scripting language i.e. Perl
The above method of using SSH command line works, but is not as flexible as using SSH API.
The SSH API is from libssh2, Perl has a module,NET::SSH2,to utilize libssh2 to provide the same function of ssh in cygwin. The benefits of NET::SSH2  are: better error handling and no ssh host key prompt issue.
Install Perl for Windows
Activeperl is probably the most popular choice in Windows, but it has limited number of pre-built Perl Modules, it is very hard to compile from source for new modules. Activeperl itself doesn't have compiler or make utility, you can get MinGW compiler or dmake, but the chance of success build is very slim.
Strawberryperl,http://strawberryperl.com/  is an opensource project for Perl in Windows, it has built-in compiler and related tools. It can download and install modules in www.cpan.org
As of Strawberry Perl 5.12, net::ssh2 is built-in, the following is simple example of of net:ssh2 usage.

##Note: if you encounter an error "libssh2-1_.dll was not found", you need to add the path of the dll, "C:\strawberry\c\bin", into %PATH% env variable
use  warnings;
use strict;
use Net::SSH2;
use constant BUFLEN => 10_0000 ;
my $ssh2 = Net::SSH2->new();
$ssh2->connect('server1.example.com',22) or die "Unable to connect Host $@ \n";
if ($ssh2->auth_password('user1','Pass1')) {
#if ( $ssh2->auth_publickey ( 'user1', 'id_rsa.pub', 'id_rsa')) { 
my $chan2 = $ssh2->channel();
#$chan2-&gtblocking(0);
$chan2->exec ("uname -a\n");
$chan2->read($buf, BUFLEN );
print $buf;
$chan2->close;
} else {
warn "auth failed.\n";
}