Hello
Our company has been struggling with frustrating Visual Studio 2008 (Some are common to Visual Studio 2003/2005) issues for a while now (around 6 month).
The encountered issues range between:
- The symbol file xxxx.pdb does not match the module
- Breakpoint are skipped although they seem “being active”
- Breakpoint displays the dreaded exclamation mark for no apparent reason even if sure that the debugging a binary and its matching pdb
- Crash of Visual Studio 2008 while debugging (Not talking about Mx disconnecting from the Debugger)
- Extremely slow debugging experience
After checking many posts on the net, nothing seems to indicate that this has been correctly addressed by Microsoft:
VS2008 - Loses debug information:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vcgeneral/thread/326c73ca-86c1-4117-8254-95640e08cdf4/
The symbol file XXX.pdb does not match the module:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vcgeneral/thread/2b164b6a-631e-41b5-9989-d5c805de35e0
Compiler producing mismatching PDBs
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/forums/en-US/vcgeneral/thread/bce16b27-4bfd-4ea9-9b77-cafc73a3e7ad/
vc8 linker bug ?
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vcgeneral/thread/bbe44cb5-ce0e-40fd-a230-a1196250f099/
During my "debugging of the debugger", I made sure to:
- Check that no handle lock are being held on the pdb
- Module Window proudly says "Symbols Loaded" for the problematic module
- Deactivate Incremental linking
- Deactivate Edit and Continue
- Uninstall all add-ins (Third post mentions Perforce plugin which we have...)
- Checked using the
chkmatch tool that the dll and the pdb produced after a build does match
- Stopped any SCM interference (Tools/Options/Source Control/Plugin Selection/Current SC plug-in: None)
- Cycled through the flag /ZI /Zi /Z7
-…
Workaround
Apart from using other debuggers (Not for the faint of hearts: WinDbg part of
Debugging tools for Windows), the only workaround, for the time being, as some of you already know, is to uncheck the settings under Tools/Options/Debugging/General/ "Require source
files to exactly match original version" (which is against what I believe in… but who cares?).
This will restore the older Visual Studio version’s behaviour where the source and the symbols are not matching but one can at least position a breakpoint.
Is there already a fix available for this? If not can we expect a correct resolution for this?
Regards
Johnny MKHAEL
