Visual Studio Debugging Issue - No PDB files

Question

Hi, I have been experiencing an issue when trying to debug any of my projects in Visual Studio 2022 - Version 17.7.7. I am currently using ArcGIS Pro 3.2.1 and when I am trying to debug, my breakpoints say that no symbols are loaded. So I've gone ahead and loaded the symbols but I've noticed that the ArcGIS Pro symbols do not load correctly. It says that it can't find the PDB files for the .dll files.

I've checked the location of the PDB files and inside the folder is a txt file called "symsrv.miss.txt" that says "https://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

https://symbols.nuget.org/download/symbols "

I've noticed that I've encountered this issue mostly after updating to ArcGIS Pro 3.2.1 as I did not experience this issue in the previous version. Would someone be able to help me out with this?

SteveXu · Answer

Charles: Thank you very much. "Enable Just My Code" resolves my debug issue which is the same as Chris described.

CharlesMacleod · Answer

All Pro .pdb files are optimized and are stripped of debug symbol information. Therefore my default setting is "Enable Just My Code" to skip the Pro .pdb symbol loading. They have nothing usable in them anyway so this setting helps to speed up the Pro application startup in the debugger. As an example:

'ArcGISPro.exe' (CoreCLR: clrhost): Loaded 'C:\ArcGIS\bin\Extensions\Editing\ArcGIS.Desktop.Editing.dll'. 
Skipped loading symbols. Module is optimized and the debugger option 
'Just My Code' is enabled.

Usually pdbs dont load if they are missing/cannot be found or dont match the version of the dll they are "paired" with. Perhaps that is the case in your situation? that the debugger is finding older pdbs...?

but, that all said, I am not sure what difference it is making to your debug experience (not loading them) given that all user code/symbol info is optimized away....

Anyway, here's an article from MS - it may hlp u in debugging why your pdbs dont load, espec if u do not want to use the "Just My Code" option:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/debugger/specify-symbol-dot-pdb-and-source-files-in-the-visual-studio-debugger?view=vs-2022#compiler-symbol-options