Why are my local dlls permanently loaded after installing _NT_SYMBOL_PATH?

Question

I installed _NT_SYMBOL_PATH and pointed to

srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

When I start the debugger, I notice that the Windows-related DLLs load quickly. However, our dlls company takes god an awful long time to download. When I get rid of _NT_SYMBOL_PATH, restart the visual studio, then everything loads pretty quickly (although I don't have MS characters).

It is almost as if over the character server above which my internal dll pdbs was searched, instead of the first check to see if they exist locally. Some of these dlls I do not have pdbs. Some of them are part of my solution, so I create them when debugging and always have pdbs.

How is Visual Studio looking for characters? Anyway, can I control how the visual studio searches for characters? Can I explicitly say that for a dll from a given directory you do not need to search for characters? Is there anything else that can drag how fast the characters load or something I can do to speed things up?

Answer 1

Visual Studio searches _NT_SYMBOL_PATH for any paths configured inside Visual Studio. This is a "feature" of the debugging mechanism. This means that your symbols will be found on Microsoft Symbol Servers.

Visual Studio 2010 ( ), _NT_SYMBOL_PATH " ". , .

, _NT_SYMBOL_PATH Microsoft:

_NT_SYMBOL_PATH=cache*C:\symbols;\\mysymsvr\Symbols;SRV*C:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols

Answer 2

@Roger.

Visual Studio, _NT_SYMBOL_PATH Visual Studio.

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