Symbol Server Explanation

Question

In this answer, the user suggests using character servers.

Can someone explain how they work and how to configure (if possible) with TFS 2008?

Answer 1

Essentially, Symbol Server is a file server that stores your debugging symbols centrally, on the server, and not on every development system. You can then point Windbg (or your selection debugger) to the Symbol server to resolve symbol names. Everyone can use the same server. Microsoft is even making a publisher accessible server for Windows characters. (Windows build debugging required).

see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/b8ttk8zy.aspx

for Microsoft Public Symbol Server: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/311503

Answer 2

Check Source server configuration for TFS assemblies . You can also point to the symbol server in Visual Studio by choosing Tools> Options> Debugging> Symbols.

Also check out the book on advanced Windows debugging . This indicates the character server settings.

Answer 3

If you are going to make a symbol server, make sure that it also has a source. To do this, you first need two things. Install Perl and debugging tools for windows. Then you call tfsindex.cmd with two flags -source = (with the path to your local repository) and -symbols = (with the path to the binary files). This is done through all the PDB files that will be uploaded to the character server. Distorts any source code files specified in pdb, and replaces refrences with a place holder that allows visual studio to pull the correct version of the file in question from tfs.

After you have installed part of the source code, it's time to download the characters to the shared folder that you configured. To do this, you call sysmstore.exe to take care of actually submitting them to the character server.

Both tfsindex.cmd and sysmstore.exe are part of the debugging tools for windows.

Answer 4

Of course, here is more information about integrating Symbol server and source server into TFS .

Answer 5

There are some simple instructions for setting up a visual studio debugger to use a copy of characters on Microsoft servers. I have not tried this http://referencesource.microsoft.com/serversetup.aspx

I found this link a while ago, filing an application when necessary. As of 8/23/2009, it looks like it does not yet support the .Net version on Win7.