Getting code from Windows Azure VM

Question

OK, so my hard disk just crashed. Big deal. All my web dev code that was on it went along with it, and now I'm running ddrescue on Ubuntu trying to recover whatever data I can recover. The hard disk keeps disconnecting and sometimes it can quit responding for a long time so it's really a pain in the ass.

Anyway, back to the main topic--I have my web dev code which was packaged and uploaded to Azure; now what I'm wondering is if it's possible to obtain all my .cs files from the VM. I noticed approot and siteroot folders, but all I saw were the views, the .asax file, some other misc, stuff, nothing with the .cs extension.

Is there any way I can get a copy of the code I packaged? or (as a last resort) any way to get the .cspkg file and work from there?

Answer 1

The site you are seeing on the web role and inside the cspkg file is the output of the compile, so you can't get the original .cs files out of them. That said, you can use a tool like Reflector, Just Decompile, or a variety of other decompilers out there to reverse engineer your compiled bits into something that will be very close to the original C# code (not I'm assuming this is your own code, or code that doesn't have a provision against reverse engineering). This at least will let you use the bits on the webrole to get the majority of your code back, then review it to see how good a job it did.

Note, you can open the cspkg file. It's just a zip file. You can rename with a .zip file extension and open it up, but you won't find the .cs files in there. The only time you find this to be the case is if you have multiple websites within a single web role. The default packager for Windows Azure doesn't compile the additional sites, only packages up all the files in their root directory. Not at all helpful for actual deployments really, but this won't likely help you.

You are likely well ahead of me on this, but I'd recommend using a personal source control system of some sort to avoid this issue in the future.