Gacutil Command To Install Dll Into Gac' title='Gacutil Command To Install Dll Into Gac' />PDB Files What Every Developer Must Know. Thanks for visiting one of the most popular pieces Ive ever written Based on questions Ive written a few follow up articles you might find useful to extend your PDB knowledge after reading this one. Keeping Specific PDB Files from Loading in the Debugger. Do PDB Files Affect PerformanceCorrectly Creating Native C Release Build PDBs. How Many Secrets do. NET PDB Files Really Contain If youd love to know more about debugging, check out my Mastering. NET Debugging or Mastering Windows Debugging for native C courses over at our great on demand learning site Wintellect. Download Android X86 3 0 Isolation. NOW. Because youre obviously a great developer for reading this, use the code JOHNR 2. Are you more interested in instructor lead trainingWe can do that to so check out our course catalog. If you have any questions about PDB files ask a question in the comments, email me john AT wintellect DOT com or ask me on Twitter John. KB/dotnet/430568/3_Search.png' alt='Gacutil Command To Install Dll Into Gac' title='Gacutil Command To Install Dll Into Gac' />Wintellect. Most developers realize that PDB files are something that help you debug, but thats about it. Dont feel bad if you dont know whats going on with PDB files because while there is documentation out there, its scattered around and much of it is for compiler and debugger writers. While its extremely cool and interesting to write compilers and debuggers, thats probably not your job. What I want to do here is to put in one place what everyone doing development on a Microsoft operating system has to know when it comes to PDB files. This information also applies to both native and managed developers, though I will mention a trick specific to managed developers. Ill start by talking about PDB file storage as well as the contents. Since the debugger uses the PDB files, Ill discuss exactly how the debugger finds the right PDB file for your binary. I dont like bloating the GAC and only install. To install the assembly into GAC on development machine, i. Windows SDK installed, use following command gacutil. WinSCPnet. dll. Ive trying to deploy some code to a client machine, where I dont want to install MS windows SDK tools. This means dont have access to gacutil. I also have not. Application code is always split between many assemblies. In addition to an applications own assembly, all Mono applications reference the mscorlib assembly, which. Finally, Ill talk about how the debugger looks for the source files when debugging and show you a favorite trick related to how the debugger finds source code. Before we jump in, I need to define two important terms. A build you do on your development machine is a private build. A build done on a build machine is a public build. Help/Doc/ASPNET/2011.2/CLR4.0/html/images/Web_DeploymentGuide_DeploymentUsingtheGAC_02.png' alt='Gacutil Command To Install Dll Into Gacc' title='Gacutil Command To Install Dll Into Gacc' />Gacutil Command To Install Dll Into GacapsThis is an important distinction because debugging binaries you build locally is easy, it is always the public builds that cause problems. The most important thing all developers need to know PDB files are as important as source code Yes, thats red and bold on purpose. Ive been to countless companies to help them debug those bugs costing hundreds of thousands of dollars and nobody can find the PDB files for the build running on a production server. Without the matching PDB files you just made your debugging challenge nearly impossible. With a huge amount of effort, my fellow Wintellectuals and I can find the problems without the right PDB files, but it will save you a lot of money if you have the right PDB files in the first place. As. John Cunningham, the development manager for all things diagnostics on Visual Studio, said at the 2. PDC, Love, hold, and protect your PDBs. At a minimum, every development shop must set up a Symbol Server. Ive written about Symbol Servers in MSDN Magazine and more extensively in my book, Debugging. NET 2. 0 Applications. You can also read the Symbol Server documentation itself in the Debugging Tools for Windows help file. SQL Server Integration Services is a framework for developing ETL solutions based on the. NET Framework. If you need to process data on a rowbyrow basis, you could. I have a requirement to extract data from a SharePoint list. Ideally I would like to be able to do this from an SSIS package. In an earlier tip you showed how to do. Specifically, Gacutil. Gacutil. exe provides. Look at those resources to learn more about the details. Briefly, a Symbol Server stores the PDBs and binaries for all your public builds. Gacutil Command To Install Dll Into Gac TopThat way no matter what build someone reports a crash or problem, you have the exact matching PDB file for that public build the debugger can access. Both Visual Studio and Win. DBG know how to access Symbol Servers and if the binary is from a public build, the debugger will get the matching PDB file automatically. Most of you reading this will also need to do one preparatory step before putting your PDB files in the Symbol Server. That step is to run the Source Server tools across your public PDB files, which is called source indexing. The indexing embeds the version control commands to pull the exact source file used in that particular public build. Thus, when you are debugging that public build you never have to worry about finding the source file for that build. If youre a one or two person team, you can sometimes live without the Source Server step. For the rest of you, read my article in MSDN Magazine on Source Server to learn how to use it. The rest of this entry will assume you have set up Symbol Server and Source Server indexing. One good piece of news for those of you who will be using TFS 2. Build server will have the build task for Source Indexing and Symbol Server copying as part of your build. One complaint Ive heard against setting up a Symbol Server from some teams is that their software is too big and complex. I have to admit that when I hear people say that it translates to me as My team is dysfunctional. Theres no way your software is bigger and more complex than everything Microsoft does. They source index and store every single build of allproducts they ship into a Symbol Server. That means everything from Windows, to Office, to SQL, to Games and everything in between is stored in one central location. My guess is that Building 3. Redmond is nothing but SAN drives to hold all of those files and everyone in that building is there to support those SANs. Its so amazing to be able to debug anything inside Microsoft and you never have to worry about symbols or source provided you have appropriate rights to that source tree. With the key infrastructure discussion out of the way, let me turn to whats in a PDB and how the debugger finds them. The actual file format of a PDB file is a closely guarded secret but Microsoft provides APIs to return the data for debuggers. A native C PDB file contains quite a bit of information Public, private, and static function addresses. Global variable names and addresses. Parameter and local variable names and offsets where to find them on the stack. Type data consisting of class, structure, and data definitions. Frame Pointer Omission FPO data, which is the key to native stack walking on x. Source file names and their lines. A. NET PDB only contains two pieces of information, the source file names and their lines and the local variable names. All the other information is already in the. NET metadata so there is no need to duplicate the same information in a PDB file. When you load a module into the process address space, the debugger uses two pieces of information to find the matching PDB file. The first is obviously the name of the file. If you load ZZZ. DLL, the debugger looks for ZZZ. PDB. The extremely important part is how the debugger knows this is the exact matching PDB file for this binary. Thats done through a GUID thats embedded in both the PDB file and the binary. If the GUID does not match, you certainly wont debug the module at the source code level. The. NET compiler, and for native the linker, puts this GUID into the binary and PDB. Since the act of compiling creates this GUID, stop and think about this for a moment. If you have yesterdays build and did not save the PDB file will you ever be able to debug the binary again No This is why it is so critical to save your PDB files for every build. Because I know youre thinking it, Ill go ahead and answer the question already forming in your mind no, theres no way to change the GUID. However, you can look at the GUID value in your binary.