Hello I recently deleted what I thought was an unused folder which happened to have the solution and code for a windows application I am maintaining.
I have published the app multiple times with ClickOnce and have access to the application manifest, deploy, etc. Is there a way for me to use the published application to get back my solution?
Thanks
If you don't currently use source control, I would highly recommend using one. I'm not aware of a way to get back all the solution files without source control, but you can get back the code using .NET Reflector. There is a file disassembler add-in which allows you to dump the code straight out of Reflector.
not possible. you can't recover the solution and original code from the compiled and deployed version.
if you have not used that machine or hard drive since you deleted it, you may be able to recover the files but it's a long shot and may be expensive.
you need to invest some time in learning source control. git, mercurial, subversion... they're all free and easy to use in windows. having your code in source control would prevent this problem - delete it all you want, just do a checkout from source control again.
Just go get the project back from Subversion.
Basically all you can do at this point is feed the assemblies to a program like reflector and reverse engineer it back. Welcome to sucksville.
If you don't have your stuff in some type of repository already I'd highly recommend fixing that first thing in the morning. With free tools like subversion available, nevermind things like TFS or even VSS there just isnt a good excuse.
Related
I made today few changes by ctrl+h to all the solution.
When I understood my mistakes I tried to undo it with ctrl-Z but the results were awful.
The question is : How can I reload the last compiled project before I had done this stupid move.
Lets say I want the solution as it was at yesterday.
Thanks for your help,
Eliran.
you can try decompiling the old binary with tools like dotPeek. But in general that is the reason why you use a source control system.
You cannot. Once saved, the changes are irreversible. That's the point of backups. There are tools to decompile your .NET executable, but as not all sourcecode is actually compiled into the executable (for example formatting and comments are not), you will never get your original code back.
You may want to look into source control software like Git, Subversion or Team Foundation Server to handle this problem properly next time.
Additional info: I thought it might be helpful to say that my forms and classes are in the same solution as the already updated forms.
In our company we have this project which 3 people are working on it. One works on the database part, me and another colleague of mine are working on making the UI ready and relating it to database which is MS SQL Server 2012 and we are programming in C# in VS 2012.
The problem is that I made this one form ready, but the server version is ahead of me. That is, if I check in the whole program, I will damage the project as some forms has changed and the version I have is older. I tried right clicking and checking in only the forms and classes which I, myself made and I have their latest version. They check in without any error or anything, but the problem is, when my colleagues or myself(after deleting my source project) try to get latest version, my forms or classes doesn't show up.
We also tried to check in the whole program but only accept those pending changes which are made by me, still no success.
The problem is, we are kinda afraid to play with the server version as a lot of effort has gone into it.
Any help will be really appreciated as I'm stuck with this problem and the manager won't give me more parts of the program to make until we can come up with some way to deal with this.
You haven't mentioned merging at all but I think this is the answer to your question.
When you work on an older version of the code (because your local code is older, or maybe the whole branch of the code is older), you need to merge the code into the newer version. When you merge, any potential conflicts are detected and you can resolve all of them manually. There's obviously tools to help you - one is built into Visual Studio but you can replace it with an external tool which may work better for you. Either way, you need to decide how to merge the code. You have a few options:
take the whole code from the source (old code in this case),
take the whole code from the target (new code in this case),
merge the changes and take bits from each version based on your knowledge of the changes and how the code should look like.
As for why the forms don't show up, you probably didn't check in the changes to the project file so the new files are not part of the project as it exists in Team Services.
I browsed through some questions and this one stood out as the better one:
.Net Classes and their source code which pointed me to this place here: Microsoft Reference Source Server.
I tried everything the site says, downloaded a file that I cannot open from there and at some point ended up with a .pdb file in my source folder for the symbol cache that I could not open with a multitude of tools I looked into.
So this is my last resort to find an answer to my question. Out of pure curiosity (and lack of a better way to understand some stuff) I want to open a particular class from Microsoft (namely I wanna look into RichTextBox and maybe the classes it inherits from) but I simply cannot find a way to make this work for me. I want the original source, not a decompiler product because, well because I mainly need to understand some stuff, not see random variable names. I appreciate any help that may get me around my stupidity and clumsiness, as well as the right tools to do so (if any other than VS).
Note that I am using Visual Studio 2012 and yes, I went over a guide covering this specific version instead of the guide on VS 2008.
The "download" links on this page: http://referencesource.microsoft.com/netframework.aspx should work. However try downloading them via Internet Explorer; my Firefox attempted to download an .aspx file instead of the installer itself for some reason. (EDIT: as #ParagMeshram pointed out, just rename the netframework.aspx to netframework.msi as a quick fix if necessary)
In addition, here's a link to the source hosted by dotnetframework.org: http://www.dotnetframework.org/default.aspx/4#0/4#0/untmp/DEVDIV_TFS/Dev10/Releases/RTMRel/wpf/src/Framework/System/Windows/Controls/RichTextBox#cs/1305600/RichTextBox#cs
I can't say for certain if it's the latest greatest, or what you would be compiling against exactly, but should give you a good idea of how it works.
I want to make my software autoupdate itself, but I don't have extensive webdesign skills, nor any available website/online hosting. I want to do it in C#/WPF.
So I was wondering if there could be a way to make an autoupdate service using google code, something clean. I'm guessing I'm not the first one to think of it.
I'd do it this way:
1) Use a WebBrowser (silently) and navigate to my google code page. On that page I'd put a field where I enter the latest version number. (I need to somehow find that number in the page's content).
2) I compare that number to the version currently installed (I could put the CURRENT_VER_NUMBER in a *.txt in the software's folder for example).
3) If I conclude that a new version is available, I download it from the "Downloads" tab of my google code project, unzip it, overwrite the files in the installation directory, and restart the app.
First of all, would that work fine? When I imaginate it, it sounds like dirty code.
Then, I wouldn't know how to navigate to the downloads tab, even less how to select the latest version there (maybe by doing a very strict file naming), and download it.
And last but not least, If the application is already running in order to perform the update check, I couldn't overwrite the files without quitting the application, does that mean I have to make some kind of "master app" that performs the check before starting my software? Sounds dirty too =/
Any input is very welcome,
Have a nice day.
I suggest you take a look at ClickOnce. It doesn't require you to create a webpage. You only need to host 2 files: a .manifest file that contains information about your app (version, name and a link to the package that contains your application) and the latest version of your application package. The only thing you need to do is host those 2 files and put a link on your Google Code page to that .manifest file. Users click that link and .net will automatically install or check for the latest version and update if necessary.
You may want to have a look at a library I wrote and released as open-source to do just that transparently - including an external update application to do the actual cold update. See http://www.code972.com/blog/2010/08/nappupdate-application-auto-update-framework-for-dotnet/
The code is at http://github.com/synhershko/NAppUpdate (Licensed under the Apache 2.0 license)
I ran into a few problems, but overall it was not so hard. I think the approach is clean so I'm putting it out there if anyone ever wants to achieve something similar.
You'll have to check out: https://code.google.com/p/theomniscientchimp/ where the full source is available, and of course adjust it for your project.
Thanks for the comments on my original post, made me feel confident i was doing it right =)
Just a quick question:
I'm in the finalizing state of my current C# project, and I'd like to send a version out to people that has 90% of the features initially requested, but it'll be a version of the software that will do all they need - they need the software as soon as possible, basically.
Therefore I'm going to be using the online install option in VS2008 that will use updating to add the final few features, as well as additional things, later. What I'm wondering is the following:
The program will come packaged with a .mdf file. When I create a new version of the program however, I don't want to change all of the data that has been added to the database already. My question is how do I go about doing this?
Thanks!
How are you planning to distribute the update? An installer will have flags indicating when a file should be replaced. (Date, version etc)
One-Click installation has the ability to check for changes on program startup.