How to Get Your Source Code Back from a Developer Who Has Stopped Responding

Start with what you can reach today. Each level of access recovers a different part of the system, and most of it is recoverable.

What each level of access gets you

The production server. With RDP, FTP or a hosting control panel you can copy the deployed files. For a .NET application the bin folder holds compiled assemblies, and ILSpy or dotPeek will decompile them to readable C#. You get the logic back. Comments, some local variable names, the project structure, tests and build scripts do not come back. Razor and .aspx files are usually deployed as plain text unless the site was precompiled. web.config or appsettings.json holds connection strings, API keys and settings. Minified JavaScript bundles are the weak spot: the original front-end source is not usefully recoverable from them.

The database. Schema, stored procedures, triggers, SQL Agent jobs and the data are all intact. On older systems a large share of the business logic lives here.

The accounts. Hosting or cloud subscription, domain registrar, DNS, certificates, email delivery, payment gateway. Check whose name and whose credit card each one is under.

What is gone without the repository. Commit history, the reasoning in it, the build pipeline and any automated tests.

The order to work it

1. Secure the access you have. Confirm your organization is an owner on the hosting account, the domain and DNS. Add a second administrator. Hold off on rotating passwords the running application uses until you know what depends on them.
2. Take copies to storage you control. A full database backup, the deployed files, the configuration and the IIS or App Service settings. Do this before any other conversation.
3. Send one clear written request. Ask for the repository with its history, or a zip of the source, by a specific date. Keep it factual. A direct request with a date resolves many of these.
4. Then the contract. Ownership turns on the IP assignment or work-for-hire language and on payment status. That is a lawyer's question, and steps 1 and 2 put you in a better position whatever the answer is.

Two things to avoid: opening a billing dispute before the copies are made, and removing the developer's access before you have inventoried what runs under their accounts.

If the code never arrives, a decompiled codebase plus the database is enough to rebuild a working repository. Budget time for restoring structure and writing tests around behavior before changing anything. The inventories in what to do when a .NET developer leaves without documentation apply from that point.