Editing Files in a WSP

Sometimes you don't have the Visual Studio project handy for a wsp--but you want to change something (settings, etc). I can remember trying this a while back and finding it tedious--having to resort to makecab and the like. The need came up again so I figured it was worth a search to see if anything had changed, and behold, there is an easier way now. Thanks to Grumpy Wookie for posting about a nice archiving utility, IZArc, and how to use it to edit wsp's. I found a slightly simpler process. The steps are basically:

• Rename the WSP to CAB
  
• Extract the wsp to a folder
  
• Edit the extracted files as needed
  
• Select all the files in extracted folder (Ctrl-A) and create a zip archive (this avoids the problem Grumpy Wookie ran into with IZArc not handling subfolders)
  
• Open the zip in IZArc and do Tools > Convert Archive and select Cabinet (.cab) as the Output Type to create it as a CAB
  
• Edit the created cab file to change it back to a wsp
  

You can download IZArc from CNet.

I wouldn't normally blog about something this trivial, but I figure the more blog posts on this, the better.