Assembly manifest (Windows)
From Just Solve the File Format Problem
An Assembly manifest of the MS Windows variety is a file used for Windows applications (particularly of the side-by-side assembly variety) to indicate what items are part of the package and how they fit together.
The concept of a "manifest" accompanying a software package has been used in a number of platforms in a variety of file formats (Google Chrome apps have a manifest in JSON form), but the Windows variety has a specific format in XML using the urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1 namespace.