Have you ever needed, or wanted to see the list of files stored inside an MSI? When you wind up with a fair sized project, with a lot of third party components it’s not always clear what you need to deploy if you want to do a simple xcopy style deployment. I’ve found a tool though that makes it easy.
LessMSIerables, available from http://blogs.pingpoet.com/overflow/archive/2005/06/02/2449.aspx is a handy tool that will let you not only peer inside the contents of any MSI file, but extract the contents to a directory as well.
It’s a pretty simple interface, just use the … button to the right of the File text box to load an MSI file, you can view in the table on the screen. Use the Extract button to pull all the files out to a directory, very handy for xcopy style distributions.
There are also ways to run this from the command line, great when doing automated builds. Go to the website to download it, as well as seeing full instructions.
Arcane Code 