When you deploy your project, App Studio sends an extra file to the server called the manifest. It contains a list of files which are part of your project and should be downloaded to the device, so it can run offline.
When we released App Studio in 2010, the ending for this file was .manifest. Someone noticed that Microsoft was already using .manifest for another purpose. A few months ago, the standard was changed to .appcache (though .manifest is also fine.)
In App Studio 2.5, the default for new projects is .appcache. Existing projects will continue to use .manifest and work fine. You can control the ending of the manifest file in the new ‘manifestfile’ Project Property.
If you want to use .appcache in your project, you will need to a few things:
- Change manifestfile in Project Properties
- Delete your project completely from your server and do a full deploy.
- Make sure your server gives a MIME type of
text/cache-manifestfor .appcache files. More info is here.
One of the benefits of using .appcache is that some servers are already configured with the right MIME type. An interesting one is DropBox: if you deploy your project to the Public folder of your DropBox, people can run it from there.