Are there any advantages to using the Secret Manager instead of environment variables for developing ASP.NET Core, Azure Functions, Azure WebJobs and Xamarin projects using Visual Studio 2017?
Maybe another way of asking the same question but which one is the newer/more preferred method?
Secret Management is a mechanism of storing sensitive arguments within the profile of executing user, while using environment-variables aren't hidden from the view. Aside from the location of such data, I don't think there are any other major differences related to performance of retrieval or similar. You won't make a mistake if you decide to store non-sensitive data using the same secret-management, if you'd like - at that point it becomes a preference.