Windows Azure Cloud Service: recover lost source code

Question

I have a cloud service (WCF role) published on Azure. Source code has been lost. Is there anyway to download the deployment package back from Azure? Or any other way to get the DLL's back.

Answer 1

Perhaps. If you have RDP enabled, or at least configured, in your service definition on the role you can RDP into the instance and retrieve the DLLs that way.

If you deployed using Visual Studio then a copy of the package is in one of your Storage accounts because it uploads the package there before deploying it. Check each of your storage accounts for a vsDeploy container in your BLOB storage. I think a few other deployment mechanisms use this as well. If you find it you can download the cspkg file, rename it .zip and open it up just like a zip file. Inside for each role you'll see a cssx file. Extract that and rename it to .zip as well. Opening the csx folder will show you the code that was deployed to your instance.

Regardless of how you perform your deployments I highly recommend keeping the cspkg files you publish so that you can rollback or know what went out. I'd also recommend having RDP at least configured in your service definition but perhaps disabled for when you need to troubleshoot. Turning it on and off is a configuration update, though that can have it's own side effects.

If all else fails and you have a Windows Azure Support level of some kind above free you can put in a ticket to see if they will retrieve the DLLs for you I guess. I've not tried that.

Update: I didn't know about the operation to get package that Gaurav indicated. That should be your answer to retrieve your code.

Answer 2

Windows Azure Service Management API has an operation for that: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj154121.aspx. I suggest you take a look at it.