msvsmon is locking up my pdbs

Question

During developement of my media center plugin (which has a few custom build steps to gac stuff and such) msvsmon has a rather annoying behaviour.

First compilation usually goes well, but subsequent compilations complain about myplugin.pdb being locked

Error   1   Unexpected error creating debug information file 'C:\Users\sam\source\myfile.PDB' -- 'C:\Users\sam\source\obj\Debug\myfile.pdb: The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process.

If I exit VS and nuke the object directory, I am able to compile again. Also, if I kill off msvsmon.exe I am able to compile again (but can not debug)

Has anyone seen this error? Are there any workarounds?

I already disabled live semantic errors, just in case.

Answer 1

A simple workaround : You can often rename a locked file even if it can't be deleted, so just rename the locked pdb to .pdb_ or something. You don't have to restart the IDE then