Thursday, January 17, 2008

.NET Framework Library Source Code Available

This, of course is all over the Microsoft blogs. One tidbit that's buried in Shawne's post that you should pay attention to and was a "gotcha" for me:

I also use Microsoft Symbol Server to download symbols. What's the difference? Can these two programs co-exist?

Microsoft Symbol Server provides symbols without any source information in them. That information has been removed (sometimes referred to as "stripped") before publishing. The symbols provided on the Reference Source Server are full symbols with debugging information.

The key to using both is to have your Reference Source path above the Symbol Server Path so that those symbols are searched/found first. As described in the ADVANCED USERS section above, you'll likely want to launch your debugger once with this configuration to get all the symbols downloaded, then uncheck both of these paths to avoid debugging launch slowdowns in the future. Also note that this may conflict in the future as more DLLs are added to the Reference Source Project. Meaning, if you've already downloaded the Symbol Server symbol, you'll need to delete that or change your cache path to get the Reference Source one (Visual Studio has no way of knowing which is which).

See the remaining FAQ/TROUBLESHOOTING section for more useful tidbits.

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