Release generating pdb files why

Question

Why does Visual Studio 2005 generate the  pdb files when compiling in release   I won t be debugging a release build  so why are they generated

User · Answer

Also  you can utilize crash dumps to debug your software   The customer sends it to you and then you can use it to identify the exact version of your source - and Visual Studio will even pull the right set of debugging symbols  and source if you re set up correctly  using the crash dump   See Microsoft s documentation on Symbol Stores

User · Answer

PDB file is the short name of  Program Database   It contains the information about debug point for debugger and resources which are used or reference  Its generated when we build as debug mode  Its allow to application to debug at runtime    The size is increase of  PDB file in debug mode  It is used when we are testing our application   Good article of pdb file   http   www codeproject com Articles 37456 How-To-Inspect-the-Content-of-a-Program-Database-P

User · Answer

Without the  pdb files it is virtually imposible to step through the production code  you have to rely on other tools which can be costly and time consuming   I understand you can use tracing or windbg for instance but it really depends on what you want to achieve   In certain scenarios you just want to step through the remote code  no errors or exceptions  using the production data to observe particular behaviour  and this is where  pdb files come handy  Without them running the debugger on that code is impossible

User · Answer

Because without the PDB files  it would be impossible to debug a  Release  build by anything other than address-level debugging  Optimizations really do a number on your code  making it very difficult to find the culprit if something goes wrong  say  an exception is thrown   Even setting breakpoints is extremely difficult  because lines of source code cannot be matched up one-to-one with  or even in the same order as  the generated assembly code  PDB files help you and the debugger out  making post-mortem debugging significantly easier   You make the point that if your software is ready for release  you should have done all your debugging by then  While that s certainly true  there are a couple of important points to keep in mind    You should also test and debug your application  before you release it  using the  Release  build  That s because turning optimizations on  they are disabled by default under the  Debug  configuration  can sometimes cause subtle bugs to appear that you wouldn t otherwise catch  When you re doing this debugging  you ll want the PDB symbols  Customers frequently report edge cases and bugs that only crop up under  ideal  conditions  These are things that are almost impossible to reproduce in the lab because they rely on some whacky configuration of that user s machine  If they re particularly helpful customers  they ll report the exception that was thrown and provide you with a stack trace  Or they ll even let you borrow their machine to debug your software remotely  In either of those cases  you ll want the PDB files to assist you  Profiling should always be done on  Release  builds with optimizations enabled  And once again  the PDB files come in handy  because they allow the assembly instructions being profiled to be mapped back to the source code that you actually wrote    You can t go back and generate the PDB files after the compile   If you don t create them during the build  you ve lost your opportunity  It doesn t hurt anything to create them  If you don t want to distribute them  you can simply omit them from your binaries  But if you later decide you want them  you re out of luck  Better to always generate them and archive a copy  just in case you ever need them   If you really want to turn them off  that s always an option  In your project s Properties window  set the  Debug Info  option to  none  for any configuration you want to change   Do note  however  that the  Debug  and  Release  configurations do by default use different settings for emitting debug information  You will want to keep this setting  The  Debug Info  option is set to  full  for a Debug build  which means that in addition to a PDB file  debugging symbol information is embedded into the assembly  You also get symbols that support cool features like edit-and-continue  In Release mode  the  pdb-only  option is selected  which  like it sounds  includes only the PDB file  without affecting the content of the assembly  So it s not quite as simple as the mere presence or absence of PDB files in your  bin directory  But assuming you use the  pdb-only  option  the PDB file s presence will in no way affect the run-time performance of your code     As Marc Sherman points out in a comment  as long as your source code has not changed  or you can retrieve the original code from a version-control system   you can rebuild it and generate a matching PDB file  At least  usually  This works well most of the time  but the compiler is not guaranteed to generate identical binaries each time you compile the same code  so there may be subtle differences  Worse  if you have made any upgrades to your toolchain in the meantime  like applying a service pack for Visual Studio   the PDBs are even less likely to match  To guarantee the reliable generation of ex postfacto PDB files  you would need to archive not only the source code in your version-control system  but also the binaries for your entire build toolchain to ensure that you could precisely recreate the configuration of your build environment  It goes without saying that it is much easier to simply create and archive the PDB files

User · Answer

Actually without PDB files and symbolic information they have it would be impossible to create a successful crash report  memory dump files  and Microsoft would not have the complete picture what caused the problem    And so having PDB improves crash reporting

User · Answer

PDB can be generated for Release as well as for Debug  This is set at  in VS2010 but in VS2005 must be similar       Project   Properties   Build   Advanced   Debug Info   Just change it to None

User · Answer

Why are you so sure you will not debug release builds  Sometimes  hopefully rarely but happens  you may get a defect report from a customer that is not reproducible in the debug version for some reason  different timings  small different behaviour or whatever   If that issue appears to be reproducible in the release build you ll be happy to have the matching pdb

User · Answer

Debug symbols   pdb  and XML doc   xml  files make up a large percentage of the total size and should not be part of the regular deployment package  But it should be possible to access them in case they are needed   One possible approach  at the end of the TFS build process  move them to a separate artifact

User · Answer

In a multi-project solution  you usually want to have one configuration that generates no PDB or XML files at all  Instead of changing the Debug Info property of every project to none  I thought it would be more expedient to add a post-build event that only works in a specific configuration   Unfortunately  Visual Studio doesn t allow you to specify different post-build events for different configurations  So I decided to do this manually  by editing the csproj file of the startup project and adding the following  instead of any existing PostBuildEvent tag       lt PropertyGroup Condition     Configuration       Publish   gt       lt PostBuildEvent gt          del   pdb         del   xml      lt  PostBuildEvent gt     lt  PropertyGroup gt    Unfortunately  this will make the post build event textbox blank and putting anything in it can have unpredictable results

[.net] Release generating .pdb files, why?

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