Creating a VS2013 project from installed ASP site and cms on a purchased server?

Question

I am new to MS development, though I have a language independent understanding of programming. I have just purchased server space from a low end provider. Using their cp, I installed umbraco in a sub folder and I am using MSSQL on the server for the db. I would like to create a project in Visual Studio 2013 to do development but am running into some issues.

I've downloaded the site folder from the remote server. I then created a new project for the site using C#, ASP, Empty as the project type. I then take the contents of the wwwroot directory from the download and drop them into the project root in visual studio.

If I then try to run it, it falls over with unresolvable names, perhaps related to virtual directories. This sounds right, as the installer for umbraco mentions that the appName value will be used as a virtual path to the umbraco installation.

What is the best-practice for creating a dev version from production code on a server you do not have total control over?

Answer 1

As with most .NET applications Umbraco is (partially) (pre-)compiled. This means it is not like PHP where you can just copy the deployment back to the developemnt machine an change it. You would need to reverse engineer the compiled parts of the the appliaction, change it and then recompile.

I recommend starting with a clean development version of Umbraco, replicate the settings and deploy this to the server.