My Office Add-in Manifest file is becoming increasingly unwieldy as more features, icon sizes, and languages are added. It would be beneficial to encapsulate certain areas of the Manifest into separate files or resources. I attempted to use the XML include command, but the manifest.xml file failed both validation and build when I tried.
When using a shared runtime, the application base sections are needlessly repeated for each app.
My idea is for the Manifest to support XML include files and/or something similar to .NET resource files, where different languages or Office applications could be isolated in separate files that get combined at compile time. Even better would be a system that uses a default template applied to all apps, with individual overrides at the app level.