import a "published" website into visual studio as a solution

Question

We have a website which is already deployed in the production server. We need to remodify the application and then re-deploy it. But we do not have access to the code-behind files as everything is compiled into a dll.

Answer 1

Your options are basically

1) Modify aspx / ascx files to alter text content / styling, though you won't be able to add any functionality here (well not server-side functionality anyway).

2) Reverse-engineer the DLL to produce the code-behind classes which will only produce readable code providing the assembly wasn't obfuscated. You could look at Redgate Reflector for doing this. (It's a useful developer too to have anyway).

As far as getting the files into a solution is concerned you could try creating a new web application project (deleting the Default.aspx and it's web.config which are generated as standard) then adding the aspx/ascx files into this project.