

If symbols are not loaded you will see a hollow circle with a warning symbol while in debug mode, and if you hover the mouse over it a tooltip will tell you that the breakpoint will not be hit because no symbols have been loaded.

What is in a symbol (.pdb) file? The exact contents of symbol files will vary from language to language and based on your compiler settings, but at a very high level they are the record of how the compiler turned your source code into machine code that the processor executes.pdb files that are produced as part of your build. What is a symbol file? For the Microsoft compilers, these are the.Symbol basicsīefore we delve into the details of symbol files it’s important to briefly review what symbols are and why they are important:
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In this blog post I’ll walk you through what symbols are and how to configure Visual Studio’s symbol settings (which are used by other diagnostic tools beyond the debugger such as the performance tools and IntelliTrace), the various knobs available when debugging, and how to trouble shoot issues when Visual Studio isn’t able to find the symbol files that you need. Additionally because symbols are so fundamental to debugging, we continue to make tweaks to the experience so understanding the ins and outs of how Visual Studio behaves can save you hours of frustration. However the odds are that at some point in time you’ll need to change how symbols load, where the debugger looks for them, or will need to load symbols for a 3 rd party component (e.g. Fortunately in most cases when you are building and launching your application in Visual Studio you don’t have to think about symbols for your code. Symbols are a fundamental requirement for debugging and other diagnostic tools.
