OrchardCMS pull down to visual studio

Question

If I have a version of Orchard installed on a server via Microsoft Web App Gallery from my hosting provider, Is there a good way to pull down the instance of orchard for local visual studio development?

Answer 1

When doing Visual Studio development, always use full source from Codeplex. The WebPI package is intended to use out-of-the-box when you don't want to perform any coding.

In your case it's quite tricky, though, but doable. The best approach would be to

1. Grab the full source as described here,
2. Grab the source from your server
3. Copy the files from 2. to src/Orchard.Web subdirectory found in 1. (overwriting any existing stuff)
4. Open up the /src/Orchard.sln solution in VS and add references to any custom modules you had on your server (2.) that are not in the Orchard core (1.). You will find those under the /src/Orchard.Web/Modules subdirectory.