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Symbols

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Symbols are useful for debugging and other diagnostic tools. The contents of symbol files vary between languages, compilers, and platforms. At a high level, symbols are a mapping between the source code and the binary produced by the compiler. These mappings are used by tools like Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code to resolve source line number information or local variable names.

The Windows documentation on symbols contain more detailed information on symbols for Windows, although many of the concepts apply to other platforms as well.

Learn about .NET's portable PDB format

.NET Core introduced a new symbol file (PDB) format - the portable PDB. Unlike traditional PDBs, which are Windows-only, portable PDBs can be created and read on all platforms.

What is a PDB?

A PDB file is an auxiliary file produced by a compiler to provide other tools, especially debuggers, information about what is in the main executable file and how it was produced. For example, a debugger reads a PDB to map foo.cs line 12 to the right executable location so that it can set a breakpoint. The Windows PDB format has been around a long time, and it evolved from other native debugging symbol formats which were even older. It started out its life as a format for native (C/C++) programs. For the first release of the .NET Framework, the Windows PDB format was extended to support .NET.

The Portable PDB format was introduced in .NET Core, and it's used by default when targeting .NET. When targeting .NET Framework, you can enable portable PDB symbols by specifying <DebugType>portable</DebugType> in your project file. The portable PDB format is based on ECMA-335 metadata format. For more information, see Portable PDB v1.0: Format Specification. Diagnostic tools can use the System.Reflection.Metadata library to read portable PDB files (for an example, see System.Reflection.Metadata.Document).

Use the correct PDB format for your scenario

Neither portable PDBs nor Windows PDBs are supported everywhere. To decide which format to use, consider where your project will be used and debugged. If you have a project that you want to be able to use and debug in both formats, you can use different build configurations and build the project twice to support both types of consumer.

Support for portable PDBs

A portable PDB can be read on any operating system and is the recommended symbol format for managed code. However, there are a number of legacy tools and applications where they aren't supported:

  • Applications targeting .NET Framework 4.7.1 or earlier: printing stack traces with mappings back to line numbers (such as in an ASP.NET error page). The name of methods is unaffected, only the source file names and line numbers are unsupported.

  • When you use .NET decompilers such as ildasm or .NET reflector, you won't see source line mappings or local parameter names.

  • The latest versions of DIA and tools that use DIA for reading symbols, such as WinDBG, support portable PDBs, but older versions don't.

  • There might be older versions of profilers that don't support portable PDBs.

To use portable PDBs on tools that do not support them, you can use Pdb2Pdb, which converts between portable PDBs and Windows PDBs.

Support for Windows PDBs

Windows PDBs can only be written or read on Windows. Using Windows PDBs for managed code is obsolete and is only needed for legacy tools. It is recommended that you use portable PDBs instead of Windows PDBs, as some newer compiler features are implemented only for portable PDBs.

See also