Is there a way to start Task Scheduler tasks programatically?  (say with C/C++, or VBS, or even a .bat file?)

My scenario is: I need to pull files from RCS... then after they are on the local drive... do a bunch of conversions from SW ->PDF/DWG... then after that is finished... rename the files and zip them up and copy they off somewhere for other purposes.  (using SW2012 on win7)

The overall task will take about 16hrs to run (about 300 drawings to convert and 2 different formats+download time+upload time).  I am planning to use C++ for most of the file renaming and the RCS stuff... so really just need a quick/dirty/automated way to start the conversion tasks from task-scheduler and then know when it is finished...  running every day at time X is not going to be useful for me as I only have a 18hr window to complete the task.  (I know, who configures/builds a server with 25% downtime--built-in?)

I started looking at the API, but task scheduler seems to already have a lot of the functionality I need.  But I can't find any documentation for it outside the help files (and they are slightly sparse for this sort of thing)

Thanks.