This is a quick release of something very simple, but something I thought I should share nonetheless. This little tool is built up of some little tools we use behind the scenes here, and completes the puzzle in a neat little way. The Xap & Manifest Tool is a very simple C# program that opens XAP files and reads just the WMAppManifest.xml file from them.

We created this because it was getting incredibly annoying and time consuming to have to manually rename the .XAP to .ZIP, extract the manifest, edit it, and then repackage and deploy. This tool creates a simple all-in-one text editor for the manifest files, that extracts and saves the files on the fly, as well as has a quick deploy option to send the changed XAP to the phone. And as an extra feature, it contains a patch option that cleans up Marketplace data. This works the same way as the Phone7Market program does, and simply allows free XAP downloaded from there or elsewhere to be modified and deployed to the device. It is in no way to be used for illegitimate purposes, and if it is, you're on your own. After all, this program only serves as an editor for files already obtained.

It seems a little strange, but it should be useful for developers, and I'll explain one of the tasks it helps accomplish tomorrow. Here's the download:

(Don't hotlink, link to this page instead. Thanks.)

xapTool_v1.zip

Any questions, let me know.