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.NET Remote Symbol Loading

1 post · Jan 2013 – Oct 2013

What this trail covers

Visual Studio debugger symbol loading has evolved to improve performance and usability. Key enhancements include making symbol loading fully cancellable, recording symbol misses to avoid redundant searches within a session, and implementing smarter caching for symbols downloaded from network shares. This update aims to prevent Visual Studio from becoming unresponsive during slow or interrupted symbol downloads and to optimize the symbol loading process.

All Microsoft trails
  1. .NET Remote Symbol Loading Changes in Visual Studio 2012 and 2013This post introduces changes to .NET remote symbol loading in Visual Studio. VS 2010 required symbols on the remote machine. VS 2012 and 2013 shifted to local symbol loading by default, with an exception for server-side compiled ASP.NET. VS 2013 Update 2 added the `/FallbackLoadRemoteManagedPdbs` flag for remote symbol loading. It also provides instructions on implementing registry exceptions using .pkgdef files.
  2. More on Symbol Improvements in VS2012 Update 1This post details specific improvements to Visual Studio's symbol loading mechanism introduced in Update 1. It highlights the introduction of 'cancellable symbol load' to prevent UI unresponsiveness when symbol paths are unreachable or slow, the recording of symbol 'misses' to avoid re-searching unavailable paths within a session, and enhanced caching for symbols downloaded from network shares (limiting to 5 versions). It also mentions better handling of invalid cache paths.