Is there a way to separately get the Program Files output for Visual Studio setup projects?

Question

In a Visual Studio setup project, you define a Program Files output (amongst other things of course).

Is there any way to output this to a folder directly, i.e. get that output without actually building and installing the msi to Windows?

What I am looking for is something similar to the "File System" publish method for web projects.

Alternatively, I could do with a "portable install" option in the msi (similar for instance to the Firefox portable install), or an switch in msiexec (I did not find anything like this in the documentation), or a way to extract this folder structure from the msi via a third-party tool.

Answer 1

Take a look at Administrative Installation. You run a postbuild command like:

msiexec /a "$(TargetPath)" /qn TARGETDIR="$(OutDir)\Extract"

Please note that I didn't test that command but that's the general concept. This will extract your MSI to a directory.