Best practices for maitaining symbols of binaries

Question

I have a product which has around 7 services and one User Interface. Time to time new releases are given in the product and hence the binaries get changed over a period of time.

The customer base is huge and so we get queries related to crashes of our services in some cases. To identify the cause for crash we get the symbols(PDB) of the binaries and evaluate the crash dumps.

My question is are there any best practices that would help you to maintain your pdbs and binaries of each version without putting them under source control.

Answer 1

You mentioned PDBs, so I'm going to assume a Microsoft environment.

You could setup a local symbol server, and have your release builds copy their symbols to the server as a post build step. Then you can add the symbol server to Visual Studio or WinDbg and it will take care of finding the correct PDBs.

See this blog post for more info.