Differential and Riemannian structure on the cone I think the cone (or what is also called the "half cone") is a differential manifold but not a smooth manifold.
Can anyone help me understand this the nuts and bolts way?
How explicitly can I write down the differential structure on the cone?
Also what is the natural metric on it?
(Is that what is called the "Sasakian Metric"? If yes then can one kindly explain that or give an expository reference on this?)
 A: The differentiable structure of the cone can be viewed as the same as the one of $S^1\times\mathbb R$, or $\mathbb{R}^2 - \{0\}$ . That is, you construct a homeomorphism between $\mathbb{R}^2 - \{0\}$ and the cone (as subsets of $\mathbb{R}^3$) and say that this is a diffeomorphism, in the most intuitive way: $(x,y)\mapsto (x,y,\sqrt{x^2 + y^2})$. With this imposition, the differentiable structure of $\mathbb{R}^2 - \{0\}$ is carried to the cone.
I think the "natural" metric is the one induced from $\mathbb{R}^3$: $\tilde g = i^*g$, where $i$ is the inclusion map from the cone to $\mathbb{R}^3$ and $g$ is the Euclidean metric of $\mathbb{R}^3$. 
A: There seems to be fair bit of confusion.
First of, there are different notions of "cone". The standard one refers to a cone on a topological space (see wiki article), and is defined to be  $CX = (X \times [0,1])/(X \times \{0\})$. This can, in particular, be applied to manifolds. What one gets is a topological space which, in general, is not a manifold, but can, in some special cases, be given a structure of a smooth manifold (see for example the discussion here). 
Now, if one removes the "cone point" $X\times \{0\}$, what remains is just the product  $X \times (0,1]$, which, as any product of a manifold and a manifold with boundary, is a manifold with boundary. The boundary is $X\times \{1\}$, which can be identified with $X$. This is the kind of cone one talks about in Sasakian geometry.  
This is a completely separate issue, but the distinction between smooth and C^1 manifolds is largely nonexistent, due to a theorem of Whitney.
As for Sasaki manifolds, those are very special types of Riemannian manifolds. As the wiki referenced above explains, one way to define when a given Riemannian manifold $X$ is Sasaki, is to use the Riemannian metric on $X$ to put a metric  on the cone, and see if the resulting metric makes the cone Kähler. (The article uses $X \times (0, \infty)$, which is diffeomorphic to the interior of the manifold we have, so this amounts to the same thing.) Usually it will not (Kähler metrics are quite special), but sometimes it will. 
It is done this way because Kähler manifolds are more well known - they appear as projective or affine complex varieties. The meaning of this construction is that Sasaki manifolds are boundaries of (non-compact) Kähler manifolds.
Now, with these things sorted out, one can actually ask how does one put the Riemannian metric on the cone $X \times (0, \infty)$. The formula is in the wiki article - it calls it the "cone metric". If it is unclear what it means, please ask - here as a comment, or elsewhere.  
