Symbol servers

Question

In this answer the user suggests using Symbol Servers.

Can anyone explain how they work and how to set it up (if possible) with TFS 2008?

Thanks

Answer 1

Essentially, the Symbol Server is a file server that stores your debug symbols centrally, on a server, rather than on each developer's system. Then, you can point Windbg (or your debugger of choice) to the Symbol Server to resolve symbol names. Everyone can share the same server. Microsoft even makes a publically available server available for Windows symbols. (requires the debug build of Windows).

see: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b8ttk8zy.aspx

for Microsoft's public symbols server: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311503

Answer 2

Check out Setting up Source Server for TFS Builds. You can also point to a symbol server in Visual Studio by going to Tools>Options>Debugging>Symbols.

Also check out Advanced Windows Debugging book. It talks about settings up a symbol server.

Answer 3

If you are going to do a symbol server, make sure it does the source as well. In order to do this You need two things first. Install Perl and the debugging tools for windows. Then you call tfsindex.cmd with two flags -source= (with the path to your local repository) and -symbols= (with the path to the binaries). What this does is go through all the PDB files that will be uploaded to the symbol server. Searches for any source code files refrenced in the pdb's and replace the refrences with a place holder that allows visual studio to pull down the correct version of the file in question from tfs.

After you have the source code part set, it is now time to upload the symbols up to a file share that you have set up. For this you call sysmstore.exe to take care of the actual filing of them with the symbol server.

Both tfsindex.cmd and sysmstore.exe are part of the debugging tools for windows.

Answer 4

There are some straightforward instructions to set up the visual studio debugger to use a copy of the symbols on Microsoft's servers. I haven't tried this yet myself http://referencesource.microsoft.com/serversetup.aspx

I found this link awhile ago, filing for when its needed. As of 8/23/2009 it looks like it does not yet support the version of .Net on Win7.