RE: pdb files for assemblies in GAC?



Hi Jeffrey...

The question stems from a pile of legacy considerations. I inherited a
build system that produces msi installers with Wix projects. The author of
the Wix projects constructed them to inject our assemblies directly into the
GAC (no shadowcopy or original location to remember), then it drops the .pdbs
with the other files in our install directory.

The installer doesn't know about or expect the destination machine to have
_NT_SYMBOL_PATH defined nor does it expect any other symbol file convention
to be set up.

As an experiment, after the assemblies got put in the gac, I tried copying
the .pdb file to the same file folder in the gac. When I attached the
debugger, I saw that it loaded the symbols from the gac location.

So it got me wondering about a) why the gac doesn't also handle pdbs and b)
what problems there might be from dropping the files there.

I suppose the more canonical approach would be to define _NT_SYMBOL_PATH and
put the symbol files there.

Thanks
Mark


""Jeffrey Tan[MSFT]"" wrote:

Hi Mark,

I do not think I understand you completely. Can you describe your scenario
and question in more details? Are you performing debugging with VS debugger
or windbg?

I wonder why not use the symbol store to cache the pdb symbol files for
debugging. For example, you may input the following symbol path in the VS
debugger or windbg.
"srv*C:\LocalSymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols";

Then, you may place any of your private pdb files in C:\LocalSymbols.
During debugging, the debugger will look up this directory and load the pdb
files automatically for you. Thanks.

Best regards,
Jeffrey Tan
Microsoft Online Community Support
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