Is it possible to retrieve a Visual Studio solution directly from an Azure App Service?

Question

I have an App Service in my Azure account which I deployed with Visual Studio Publish wizard. Is it possible to restore the deployed solution locally (in Visual Studio) from

Answer 1

When you publish an app to an App Service (web app), just your code is published, not the Visual Studio project / solution files. So no, unless you somehow forcibly packaged (or maybe ftp'd) a copy of your solution files, they won't be available for download.

It's fairly trivial to pull the app down to a local machine though, since Web App has built-in ftp. Just don't count on being able to retrieve source code for languages such as c# and Java (since usually just the dll/jar files are published).

Answer 2

I want to mention one thing which might be helpful if your application is .NET. There are many .NET Decompilation tools today(Reflector, ILSPY, JustDecompile etc.) that can open a .NET DLL and let you view the code (the best one being Telerik's JustDecompile which can create a PROJECT out of a .DLL file or any .NET Assembly)

The code will not look EXACTLY like the one you created but can get you pretty close. Definitely worth a try if you lost your code and looking for some way to get it. This will only work if the code was not obfuscated in the first place. There might some rework required but you can get somewhat close.