Have you ever needed to read or modify merge modules or an MSI? Orca is a tool for creating and editing Windows Installer packages and merge modules. It tool provides a graphical interface which makes it super easy to navigate through the installer.

Installing

The Orca installer is bundled in the Windows SDK, but you don’t actually need to install it. You can choose the “Download the Windows Software Development Kit…” option and select only the MSI tools. Once finished, you can find the installer at “(Folder you selected)\Windows Kits\10\WindowsSDK\Installers\Orca-x86_en-us.msi”. Just double-click it and it will be automatically installed for you under “C:\Program Files (x86)\Orca”

Reading the contents of an MSI file

To read the contents of an MSI or MSM file, all you have to do is to start Orca (located in the folder mentioned above), and then select File > Open. For this demonstration, we will open the Orca MSI file, the same one you just used. Now you can easily browse all the tables and rows included in this installer, facilitating whatever integration you might need to do.

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