I know PDBs are generated for managed projects in .NET by giving the compiler the /debug argument.
Is there a way to specify this in the VS (2005) GUI?
The only way I could get it to generate PDBs in release mode so far is to manually modify the .csproj file and to add :
<DebugSymbols>true</DebugSymbols>
<DebugType>full</DebugType>
under the 'release' settings:
<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)|$(Platform)' == 'Release|AnyCPU' ">
Another thing: I learned from MSDN here that the possible values for the DebugType tag are:
How do these values affect the compiler's behaviour?
In VS2008, you can set the property using the project properties -> Build -> Advanced... -> Debug Info.
In DEBUG:
<DebugSymbols>true</DebugSymbols>
<DebugType>full</DebugType>
<Optimize>false</Optimize>
In RELEASE:
<DebugSymbols>true</DebugSymbols>
<DebugType>pdbonly</DebugType>
<Optimize>true</Optimize>
I found this MONO request that may shed some light on what's the difference between 'full' and 'pdbonly'.
csc has a "pdbonly" debugtype that
generates pdbs, while producing
runtime code, i.e. optimised, no
debugger attributes, etc.
This is important for being able to
obtain useful stack traces from
release-quality code.
It seems to me that the existance of the 2 tags (DebugSymbols and DebugType) is redundant.
