Bytes and Bites of Internet
Archive for March, 2013
Editing MSI with OCRA
Mar 31st
If you have worked with MSI then you probably know that it uses an internal database to store all kind of information and you can actually directly modify this information by using a great tool OCRA. It is tiny utility released by MSFT.
But unfortunately it is not “that” simple to get OCRA because it is not available as separate download , instead it is part of Windows SDK. Which means that if you want OCRA you have to download whole Windows 7 SDK. And even after downloading whole 1.4 Gb ISO, this tools is not easily visible. Once you download ISO (for x64 bit download), either make DVD or mount it as virtual drive (my preferred option) then go to \Setup\WinSDKTools_amd64 and open up cab1.cab. Inside that you will see WinSDK_Orca_Msi_5E20C107_DAA3_4D49_AFAE_7FB2594F0CDC_amd64 , extract that file and add extension .msi to it. And that is your installation for OCRA !! I really don’t know why such a great tool is hidden so deep by MSFT (and it is not the only great tool neglected by them). Once you install it you will see an additional entry “Edit with OCRA” in context menu whenever you right click on MSI.
Remotely execute file on another machine
Mar 15th
As usual, I was searching something over internet and going through random crap to look for something (I don’t remember now what was that) and I somehow found that there is really great utility available in good ol’ Sysinternals Suite which literally allows user to remotely execute any application on another machine !! That utility is called PsExec.
Honestly in past sometimes I really had wished that if there is some kind of tool available which can run some program on remote machine so that I don’t have to do something crazy. But I always assumed that it simply is not possible for whatever reasons and so it crossed my mind to even search for something.
Use of this tool is actually pretty simple. And like may other tools of Sysinternals suite this one too doesn’t have any GUI to interact with. Users are required to feed bunch of parameters in order to make it work. And it is very possible that it will not work in first try because of missing parameter. To get list of all parameters you can simply run exe on command prompt and you will see something like this …
SVN checkout using BATCH and PowerShell
Mar 4th
Few days back I was working on a script to automate project builds. And at one step I was required to checkout code from source control and build the application. Since everything was done using a single script there was no way I could prompt to user GUI because in this case it was just a plain PowerShell script. After bit to experimenting and Googling, I was able to find a solution that fit my need, but then I thought to use same script as a batch script (of course with some modifications) and I was surprised to see that many commands in PowerShell are declared and used differently then what we normally do in batch script. That was same case with SVN commands.
I use Tortoise SVN for both work and myself, so I am showing this using it. But if you look at help file it is clear that Tortoise SVN is more like a GUI tool not something that can be used via CLI, in fact it is even recommended by author himself to use Official SVN tools instead of Tortoise SVN. But lucky for us, Tortoise SVN already includes official SVN tools !! You can find them at “%ProgramFiles%\TortoiseSVN\bin\”, it includes exes like SVN, SVNAdmin, SVNLook, SVNVersion etc. If they are not there then most likely they are excluded during installation (which is default installation choice). So just grab installation EXE from Tortoise SVN site and run installer again to install these tools.