What should a desktop application use to interact with Azure and manage resources?

Desktop applications, especially custom ones, interact with Azure services by calling their respective Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), often facilitated by Azure SDKs for various programming languages. These APIs provide the programmatic interface for creating, managing, and consuming Azure resources.

Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates are declarative files for deploying infrastructure as code, not a programmatic interface for an application to interact with and manage resources dynamically.

Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI) is a command-line tool designed for human administrators or scripts, not for direct integration into a desktop application's core logic for resource management.

Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, browser-based shell environment, not an interface for a desktop application to programmatically manage resources.