visual studio loading symbols

Question

i'm working on a CF project for a while now, and the VS started to behave starnge for me at least.

I observed that when I start debugging, it builds the project, it's starting the deloy, the deploy finishes and it's starting to load symbols for my project.

But it is very slow, and I don't know why it started to do this step. I have no clue what have I done?

Is this symbol loading step necessary? How can I disable it?

In the Tools -> Options -> Debugging -> Symbols dialog there is no Symbol file (.pdb) location added. And I pointed in my project's debug directory at the field below, and I checked the "Search the above directory only when symbols are ...." checkbox. I don't know how should I set up this dialog to turn off symbol loading

I looked in the Modules window which symbols are loaded, but it says nothing to me. Maybe somebody can see what is the problem

http://img842.imageshack.us/img842/5927/modules.png

thanks

Answer 1

Configure in Tools, Options, Debugging, Symbols.

You can watch the output window (view, output) to see what it's doing usually. If it's really slow that probably means it's hitting a symbol server, probably Microsoft's, to download missing symbols. This takes three HTTP hits for each file it can't find on every startup - you can sometimes see this in the status bar at the bottom or in e.g. Fiddler. You can see which modules have loaded symbols in Debug, Windows, Modules whilst you're debugging.

Symbols mean you get useful stack trace information into third party and system assemblies. You definitely need them for your own code, but I think those get loaded regardless. Your best bet is to turn off any non-local symbol sources in that menu and, if you're loading lots of symbols for system assemblies that you don't need to debug into you can temporarily disable loading those to speed up debug start - but they're often useful to have loaded.

Answer 2

Debug -> Delete All Breakpoints ( http://darrinbishop.com/blog/archive/2010/06/24/156.aspx ) After that you can use them again, but do it once. It will remove some kind of "invalid" breakpoints too and then loading symbols will be fast again. I was chasing this issue for days :(.

Answer 3

foldip,

Thank you very much. This problem was driving me crazy. Now my debugger works very fast.

-DS