Home Library Learn Downloads Support Community
Sign in | United States - English | |
6 out of 10 rated this helpful - Rate this topic

How to: Use a Symbol Server

Visual Studio 2005

You can use a symbol server to allow Visual Studio to automatically download the proper symbols for debugging your Visual Studio project.

Microsoft maintains a public symbol server for developers at http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols. This server is for symbol download only. It is not browseable. This server provides symbols for various operating systems, such as Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003, as well as MDAC, IIS, ISA, and the .NET Framework.

In addition, you may have a local symbol server set up on your Intranet or on your local machine.

To use a symbol server, you specify the path to the server in the Visual Studio options, as described in the following procedure. For more information, see How to: Specify a Symbol Path.

You can remove paths from the Symbol file (.pdb) locations list in the Options dialog box. For more information, see How to: Specify a Symbol Path.

NoteNote

Make sure the symbol server and its path are trustworthy. Otherwise you may become exposed to security threats.

To set a path to a symbol server

  1. On the Debug menu, click Options.

  2. In the Options dialog box, open the Debugging node, and click Symbols. For more information, see How to: Specify a Symbol Path.

  3. Edit the text to add a new path to the symbol server.

    • To use the Microsoft public symbol server, enter:

      Copy 
      http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

    • To use an intranet symbol server, enter:

      Copy 
      \\server\path\symbols

    • To use a symbol server on your local machine, enter:

      Copy 
      c:\path\symbols

  4. Make sure Search the above locations only when symbols are loaded manually is not selected unless you want to load symbols manually when you debug.

  5. If you are using symbols on a remote symbol server, you can improve performance by specifying a local directory that symbols can be copied to. To do this, enter a path in the Cache symbols from symbol server to this directory box. To connect to the Microsoft public symbol server, you need to enable this setting. Note that if you are debugging a program on a remote machine, the cache directory refers to a directory on the remote machine.

  6. Click OK.

  7. If you are using the Microsoft public symbol server, an End User License Agreement dialog box appears. Click Yes to accept the agreement and download symbols to your local cache.

See Also

Did you find this helpful?
(1500 characters remaining)
Community Content Add
Annotations FAQ
License dialog box on automated build machine...
Item #7 above clearly states - you'll have to click through a license dialog box to use data from the MS symbol servers. $0$0 $0 $0This is fine for a developer working on his own machine, but we have a build machine in a closet somewhere that gets sent callstacks (as a list of return addresses, plus what DLL is loaded where) from our crashing applications, and resolves those into function names for easier debugging. We use our own internal symbol server for our own symbols, but we also use the public MS symbol server for callstacks that involve MFC's internals, for example. $0 $0$0 $0 $0When we set up a new one of these, we have to make it access the MS public symbol server once, and then click through the dialog box manually. This isn't very convenient.$0 $0$0 $0 $0How do we get around #7 on a build machine? Can we just place a file somewhere, or a registry entry?$0
History
Information excludes VC++ 6.0
Information is missing for VC++ 6.0 Versions in the above page.

I hope there may be a solution for VC++ 6.0 also :-)

Where i can download symbols for VC++ 6.0 and where i need to store those symbols?


History
Error in instructions
It's not the Debug Menu, but the Tools Menu that has Options.
History
Advertisement