This is probably a deployment question, but there doesn't seem to be a deployment section in .NET Development Forum.
I thought the PDB file was only for debugging purposes, so why is there a PDB file in my bin\Release folder
What are the (dis)advantages of including this file in deployment
Why is there a PDB file in my projects Release folder?
japt
Very interesting question. You should try google it, and see what you come up with. I myself don't include pdb's in production because of the extra space they take up.
Ahmedilyas
MarcGBeauchamp
It started happen in Visual Studio 2005 only, In Visual Studio 2003 it did never happen so the thing you can see that in Visual Studio you could debug assemblies only in debug mode but in 2005 you can also debug when its set to Release.
Lets have more comments ;-)
ST1
Ingenious
gfhyang
Hi,
I am actually trying to force my project (C#, VS2005 sp1) to generate PDB files in release mode, but despite many hours of googling and searching through options I cannot find anywhere describing how (or whether) this is possible!
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Itzik Katzav
Would it not work to use the debug build (with .pdbs) to analyze the crash dump in your example I am still not convinced that there is a good reason to build .pdbs with a release build. Thanks for the very descriptive post, though
tattoo
There is nothing magic with the release configuration that prevents it from generating pdb files. You were certainly able to do so in VS2003 as well, but if I'm not mistaken, it didn't do so by default (it's been a looong time since I used VS2003 - I've been using VS2005 for the last >3 years
).
Usually, the main difference between the debug configuration and the release configuration is that the debug configuration doesn't optimize the code, whereas the release configuration turns optimizations on. Debugging non-optimized code is usually easier, but some issues don't show in debug builds, so you have to dig into the optimized bits to figure out what the problem is.
I always generate pdbs when I build. There is no need to distribute 'em, but it makes life a whole lot easier if I get a crash dump sent my way and I need to debug it.
Best regards,
Johan Stenberg
Michael Vanhoutte
If you want to eliminate the creation of the .PDB file select Project...<App> Properties...Compile Tab...Advanced Compile Options and under the Generate debug info drop-down select None.
vasudupe
Most likely not. For sure, if you have any conditional compilation, it would not. I would *never* release a version of my product without storing matching PDBs in a safe place (i.e. a symbol server).
Typically, I would not deploy the PDB file, however. If I need the symbols, I grab 'em from the symbol server...
Best regards,
Johan Stenberg