From the actual Tech-Recipes (dot com) site I found an interesting method of extracting files from MSI files which brings me to a few other useful utilities I know of.

Universal Extractor
cabextract
CabExtract (1.02 as of this post)

Then there is “The best MSI Extractor” article by Julie Smith… smart chick whoever she is.

For the geeks you can “View and Extract CAB File Contents Programmatically.“  I found a related newsgroup (scraped) article that notes a few other links as well.

Now for CAB files I absolutely cannot do without MSCEInf (2.6 as of this post) (French homepage).

An article from Download Squad:

For Designers: 10 Best Online Color Tools

For Administrators: 24 Great Open Source Apps for Admins and Technicians

I would definitely check out SysAngel DVD Generator found at the link for PING, as well.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers

Windows XP Service Pack 3 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers

Additional Links

Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2

Another Stack Overflow gem in “How to use Office from Visual Studio C#?“  The question was exhausting but one of those who responded had some sagely advice:

The answer is to “Copy Local” whatever assembly dll you get for the interop. Once you have the assembly dll in your output folder, add a reference to it, and check it into source control.

Now everyone has the referenced assembly dll.

—anonymousstackoverflow

Now I’m sure to some that may sound like kindergarten learning but it never dawned on me to put external dependencies under source control.

In this fashion a set of legacy developers can maintain legacy code while emerging standards developers can maintain the latest emergent standard — both separated from the other one’s development.

I’ve had a light bulb and it’s warm.

While on the hunt to learn how to code in C# using .NET manually (that is, without relying on the code generation templates) I ran across this article called Customizing Visual Studio’s Code Generation Templates.

While on the hunt to figure out why CheckedListBox is unavailable in my Smart Device project in Visual Studio 2008 Professional I came across this useful article about manually updating references.

Clean Visual Studio Workspace is handy for a couple reasons for me, the first of which is understanding what can and cannot be cleaned.

Here’s a related utility.

And yet another add-in straight from MSDN.

Here are a few of the installation suites that I know of:

Ghost Installer

NSIS – Nullsoft Scriptable Install System

WiX – Windows Installer XML toolset