Inside the MSI

If you're following this article, you must be interested in modifying how an MSI produced by a Visual Studio Installer project works.  Although I began by encapsulating the change in a black box, the Windows Installer Team Blog cautions in rule #1 of the Tao of the Windows Installer to "Learn the Windows Installer Technology."  There's a lot to learn here.  MSDN contains a wealth of technical information, but it's arraigned as a reference, not a text book.  I found Phil Wilson's "The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer" tremendously helpful, and it's actually aimed directly at Visual Studio Installer projects.  It goes well beyond what's available in the stock VSI project.  If you don't know what the various tables in an MSI are for, you'd be well advised to study up before making any changes.

That said, MSIs are remarkably open.  Administrators are free to make modifications in the installations their users will see.  Transforms can be applied to modify an installation.  The tool Orca lays the installer tables wide open for inspection and modification.  In fact, I used Orca to manually modify an MSI for testing before writing a single line of the script.