Extracting MSI Files Locally to Avoid Install

This post was written by dpx on August 10, 2009
Posted Under: .NET,Programming

I use a lot of tools in my .NET development projects that I like to keep in my source control repository so all developers have the same version and mostly the same configuration. I do set up my projects so these can generally be overridden, but the build system uses the ones I keep in the repository for standards sake.

Recently I’ve been seeing a lot of tools released (specifically from Microsoft) that only come in .msi format. I don’t like this because it means I either have to install the msi (which then makes the tool dependent on my platform), or I have to extract the files and add them manually to my repository.

A quick Google search for “extracting msi files” revealed a really nice blog post Howto: extract files from a .msi file using the Windows command line . Go there and learn how to extract MSI files and then add them manually to a tools repository and link externally to this repository.

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