STSADM.exe, PowerShell v2.0 and Management Shell

Question

What is the difference between the three? STSADM.exe PowerShell v2.0 Management Shell

I understand you can run powershell scripts in the management shell, but I thought I remember reading that there is different access to resources in the Management Shell than in the PowerShell. I see there are two different applications for Management Shell and one for PowerShell.

Ok, now STSADM.exe. I dont understand this at all.. Its a command line tool for which Shell? Both?! I see it allows for different operations to be performed than in Central Administration. But I would like a better understanding of the tool than just that it is different for these (memorized) tasks.

Answer 1

PowerShell is Microsoft’s next-generation scripting language offering direct access to .NET objects, complex flow and structure capabilities, and an object pipeline that makes passing objects from one command to another extremely easy.

Using Powershell in SharePoint 2010, Almost every aspect can be manipulated using any of the more than 500 out-of-the-box cmdlets or by creating custom cmdlets that can be developed and deployed just like any other core SharePoint artifact.

SharePoint 2010 Management Shell is just a PowerShell instance that loads the sharepoint.ps1 script file.

STSADM is a command line tool used to administer SharePoint. It is easily extendable, allowing developers to supplement the existing 184 out-of-the-box commands with additional commands.

STSADM is still present in SharePoint 2010, but its prominence has been greatly reduced as it is extremely limited. Using STSADM, Conditional logic was difficult to achieve using batch files. If no command was available to manipulate a setting, a custom command would have to be created. And performance was poor because of the inability to re-use objects across command calls.