Manifest is metadata about assemblies. Metadata is machine-readable information about a resource, or "data about data." In .NET, metadata includes type definitions, version information, external assembly references, and other standardized information.
Manifest: Manifest describes assembly itself. Assembly Name, version number, culture, strong name, list of all files, Type references, and referenced assemblies.
Metadata: Metadata describes contents in an assembly classes, interfaces, enums, structs, etc., and their containing namespaces, the name of each type, its visibility/scope, its base class, the nterfaces it implemented, its methods and their scope, and each method's parameters, type's properties, and so on.
