msi2xml

The command line tool msi2xml converts Windows Installer Databases (.msi / .msm) to text based XML files.

The complementary tool xml2msi reconstructs the .msi / .msm from the XML file.
There are several possible uses for msi2xml/xml2msi:
- Quality assurance: use the human readable XML file to compare changes between different versions of a .msi file.
- Version control: many version control systems are text based. Store the XML file instead of the .msi file.
- Automated build systems: using xml2msi, existing installations may be updated with new files, and automatically rebuilt.