Manifests

Application manifests describe important metadata about your published application.

In ClickTwice, there are two kinds of manifests generated as part of a "standard" publish: the ClickOnce manifest and the ClickTwice manifest.

ClickOnce manifests are special .application files that Windows (and Internet Explorer) know how to handle in order to launch a deployed application. These XML doucments are full of data, including your app's metadata, information on digital signatures and keys in the application, deployment and framework information.

The ClickTwice manifest is a simplified JSON document (*.cltw) with only the relevant application metadata used in building, publishing and distributing your application. You can find the full (C#) schema for this format here. This file is used internally by ClickTwice and some of the built-in handlers for more detailed app metadata. Note that this file is wholly independent of the ClickOnce .application manifest, which is still present in the output.

app.info

Please note that the app.info file will be merged into the ClickTwice manifest (as AppInfo) in a future update.

The app.info file is a separate metadata file that contains generic user-friendly messages, such as a summary of the app's functionality, contact and support information and author details. This information is mostly of use to post-deployment tools, such as page generators, forms and scripts. This file is wholly optional and is currently provided by the AppInfoHandler.