如何在Visual Studio中调试“发布”转储？

Question

I'm trying to debug a dump file in Visual Studio of a 'release' deployment of an w3wp process.

When I try to step into the code, it says that 'PDB does not match image.', even though it worked in the past (I rebuilt the exact commit on my machine and pointed to those generated PDBs).

Any clue how I can debug this dump / ensure that I can debug future dumps?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can't generally use pdbs generated for a different build, even if the source code is identical -- debugger places a guid and age (a counter) that get changed every build. Those 2 values must match before debugger even tries to use the pdb.

Having said that, you could try forcing that with chkmatch . If you are lucky your new build will have sufficiently similar layout to released one. To up your chances make sure you build environment is as similar as possible -- including source code location (length of the absolute path to source files might affect internal layout in the binary).

If you didn't have debug information in original build at all that won't work.

To make sure you don't have those problems in the future, always build release with debug information and then save those pdbs for released builds.

EDIT:

For C# projects, pdbs are controlled in Project Properties -> Build -> Advanced Build Settings -> Debug Info. Set it to "pdb-only" on release builds and "full" on debug (should be default). Pdb-only will not impact performance of release builds.

If you control deployment environment, pdbs can be deployed right with release binaries -- might improve dumps (not sure).

If you give the binaries to an end user, generally it is better to keep pdbs to yourself, if you want to limit reverse engineering.

If any case keep them for as long as you care about that particular version of your binary.