Visual Studio 2012 debug using different dll and pdb

Question

I am trying to open a dump file using Visual Studio 2012 but there are some PDB files missing.

Is there a way to make the debugger use another PDB file, built on my machine? Unfortunately, I can't access the original DLLs and PDBs.

I'm trying to open my PDBs using the "Browse and find ***.dll..." button but I'm getting an error message saying "a matching symbol file was not found in this folder"

Answer 1

Visual Studio does not have an option to ignore mismatched symbols. Other debuggers (like WinDbg) have that.

ChkMatch is able to modify a PDB file so that Visual Studio does not recognize the difference any more. However, the result is what it is: even a slight modification might cause the compiler to emit totally different code. What you see in Visual Studio may be totally misleading. See this answer for details.

Be warned: delete the modified file immediately after your investigation or you will hunt ghost bugs sooner or later.