Tuesday, July 3, 2012

What is a .pdb file?

It is for debugging. If you publish an app to local folder with the Release build definition instead of the Debug build definition you probably won’t have .pdb files unless you’ve gone out of your way to put them in the Release definition. (Go to Build > Configuration Manager... in Visual Studio 2010 to see all of the build definitions.) One of the annoying/helpful things a .pdb will do is it will make references to where files were compiled from bubble up in error messages. Deleting a .pdb will drop this bit of metadata. For every project outside of your UI for which you will publish a .dll, you may have a .pdb as a companion to the .dll (these files sit in the bin folder), if you want one.

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