I'm a big fan of MSI installation and I think BizTalk does a better job than any other product in leveraging MSI deployment. There are many reasons why I like MSI installation, but the number one has to be the ability to hand off from Development to Operations (and possibly through Test in-between).

Separating Development from Operations teams is critical for enterprise systems and is something BizTalk does well; if you let it. In an effort to facilitate such clean handoffs I always package bindings in my MSIs to enable the installation onto a variety of environments. Generally I create Developer, Integration, Test, and Production bindings. This has worked well for me for years.

Recently I did see one downside and that was that an Administrator may want to know more about those bindings without installing the MSI anywhere. To enable this I created an XSLT to view bindings files and added a step to my build process to create the transformed bindings view. I then either packaged these into the MSIs as file or left them in the same directory as the MSI itself. This was a bit clunky, but the Operations teams from my customers liked it.

Recently I was reading this BizTalk post and saw Randal van Splunteren's post about extracting MSI contents. I had been thinking about creating a BizTalk MSI Viewer for some time and this showed me how easy it was to do. Randal had figured out the undocumented API which made this really quite simple. This first version unpacks the MSI and displays the bindings files, then transforms them via an XSLT in the install directory of the application (if you would like to change it). I've already got a long list of features to add any may end up opening the project up in the future.

I've posted the first beta of BizTalk Msi Viewer for feedback here.