I am responsible for some of the internal tools, and I want to make them as easy as possible to debug on client machines. We usually sent the full source code and debugging information and built them in the same place as the normal client installation path. This simplified debugging.
Now we have moved on to using Windows Installer to deploy our software, and we will be the symbol for debugging information and the original pdbs index.
Now this makes debugging a real pain, since for each client that I want to debug, I need to change several parameters in Visual Studio to enable indexing of the source and add the file to the Visual Studio directory so that it does not complain about running the source control commands. I also can’t easily search for the source code, since files are extracted only on demand.
Is there a better way to do this? I tried to place the source code archives on a network share and use symbolic links for network share aliases with a local hard drive during assembly, but this requires UNC paths that the manifest tool VS2008 cannot handle.
We also used an undocumented version of the linker (/ sourcemap), which allows you to redirect all source paths to an arbitrary location, but this does not work for .Net applications (since this parameter is available for link.exe)
Even if we provided the installation source code, the paths in the PDB would still be incorrect.
Is there a way to fix PDB (Microsoft supported or unsupported) to redirect paths elsewhere?
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