How to understand .pdb files of visual studio?

Question

I opened it with an editor,totally messy.

BTW, in the "Disassembly" view,is it possible to dump all the assembly code? I tried but can only grab a screen of lines

Answer 1

Refer to this article:

PDB Files: What Every Developer Must Know

Answer 2

CodeProject: How to Inspect the Contents of a Program Database (PDB) File

Keep in mind though, that those files are for the debugger and not directly for you. At least I don't have the urgent wish of being able to read every possible file format in a text or hex editor.

Answer 3

I've been keeping track of your questions. There's context that you should have put in your question, I think you're trying to debug a DirectShow plug-in that you don't have the source code for. Some kind of camera gizmo.

No, opening a .pdb file in a text editor isn't going to show you anything useful. It is binary data. I know you have a relevant .pdb for the plug-in you're working with, you get decent stack traces with named functions. You probably got the .pdb from the Microsoft Symbol server. Reading a .pdb file is the job of the debugger. There are several APIs available to read it yourself, the dbghelp API is the core one.

But it will not show you anything you don't already know from the debugger. The .pdb file is just a database of functions. You got the stripped one, it will never show more than what you see in the call stack window.

Ultimately, this is a chain of XY questions. You keep asking about Y without ever revealing what the real X problem is all about. You'll just get useless answers, like this one, until you tell us about X.