Question

After looking around for some information about managing my azure app i found csmanage and powershell commandlets. What are the difference between these applications and which one to choose?

Answer 1

The basis of Windows Azure Services management is REST API and beauty of using REST API is that you can wrap REST in any programming language as longs as there is networking and security infrastructure available. Most of the tools you mentioned above are using REST API underneath and using Windows Azure Service Management API. CSMANAGE and PowerShell Cmdlets are using Windows Azure Service Management API to manager Windows Azure subscriptions. You can learn more about Service Management API here.

There is also another tool call WAPMMC (Windows Azure Platform Management Tool (MMC) which is also built upon Service Management API.

Besides it there are 3rd party tools which are built using Service management API i.e. Cerebrata Powershell cmdlets.

Comparing all of above, I would say Windows Azure Powershell Cmdlets is the most powerful tool among all of these and it has been updated with bug fixes and many more features added frequently. To use it in your machine you just need to download powershell cmdlets and Windows Azure SDK in your machine as these are required.
http://wappowershell.codeplex.com/

Recently I also found a Java based tool called Burp to use REST API directly from its shell to manage Windows Azure subscription. There is no need for .net framework or Azure SDK. You just need a machine with Java runtime and Burp. I have added a blog on this regard here.