PDB files map an assembly’s MSIL to the original source lines. This means that if you put the PDB that was compiled with the assembly in the same directory as the assembly, your exception stack traces will have the names and lines of the positions in the original source files. Without the PDB file, you … Read more
If you want to disable pdb file generation, you need to use the “Advanced build settings” dialog available in project properties after clicking the “Advanced…” button” located in the lower part of the Build tab. Set Output – Debug info: to None for release build configuration and no pdb files will be generated.
PDB is a debug information file used by Visual Studio. These are system DLLs, which you don’t have debug symbols for. Go to Tools->Options->Debugging->Symbols and select checkbox “Microsoft Symbol Servers”, Visual Studio will download PDBs automatically. Or you may just ignore these warnings if you don’t need to see correct call stack in these modules.
I wanted to be able to add and remove referenced assemblies in my primary application while avoiding the the need to maintain which files I needed to delete or exclude. I dug through Microsoft.Common.targets looking for something that would work and found the AllowedReferenceRelatedFileExtensions property. It defaults to .pdb; .xml so I explicitly defined it … Read more
You need to use objcopy to separate the debug information: objcopy –only-keep-debug “${tostripfile}” “${debugdir}/${debugfile}” strip –strip-debug –strip-unneeded “${tostripfile}” objcopy –add-gnu-debuglink=”${debugdir}/${debugfile}” “${tostripfile}” I use the bash script below to separate the debug information into files with a .debug extension in a .debug directory. This way I can tar the libraries and executables in one tar file … Read more
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 … Read more
A PDB file contains information for the debugger to work with. There’s less information in a Release build than in a Debug build anyway. But if you want it to not be generated at all, go to your project’s Build properties, select the Release configuration, click on “Advanced…” and under “Debug Info” pick “None”.