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
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.
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.