Comments on: Setting up a Symbol Server

By: Tangential Software Usage | EntBlog

Tangential Software Usage | EntBlog — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 07:33:54 +0000

[...] Crashes are stored as minidumps in that same folder. And, as we distribute pdb with our releases, this means that everybody in the team can open any dump from any release and reproduce the exact crashing conditions everywhere. For more information about symbols, read my previous article about Setting up a Symbol Server [...]

By: JIRA: Build Farm

JIRA: Build Farm — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:53:11 +0000

[BLD-339] Setup MS symbol server for plugin symbols…

Just like we can load symbols for IE, Windows, and FF from symbol servers it would be incredible useful if we could do the same for the plugin. Could you look into what we need to do? It’s probably just a question of transferring files somewhere and t…

By: ent

ent — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 15:55:54 +0000

Yes, you gave the answer to yourself.
In my machine, .dmp are registered to Visual Studio, so double clicking is enough to open the MiniDump. Then you need to hit F5 to start debugging it.

By: Anthon

Anthon — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 15:16:43 +0000

Sorry, I fired the question to early.
You have to load this *file* not with File->Open->File but with File->Open->Project/Solution %-)

By: Anthon

Anthon — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 15:02:41 +0000

Thanks for this entry. I managed to save a minidump.dmp file without problem. And I can see that the symbol store is correct using windbg/cdb.
However I cannot seem to load this file meaninfully into Visual Studio 2005 (I start that by hand as 2003 is installed as well on my machine). When opening this file I get into some sort of hexeditor mode. There doesn’t seem to be a ‘Load Crashdump’ option or similar in VS2005 (like there is in WinDbg).

Am I missing something? I would realy like to finish this setup and use
this to checkout files from our revision control system.

By: ent

ent — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 22:34:24 +0000

Yeah, thanks for clarifying. Those symbols are a good start for the symbol server.

One day, I will update this article with that kind of information, how to set up the source control server with subversion and other interesting tricks.

By: josh

josh — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:09:49 +0000

Nice post.

It is also worth mentioning that if you want to jump start the microsoft symbols on your hard drive or share, you can download the packages for the links above, then add them using symstore.exe (if you want to maintain the same organization). This is a good idea if you anticipate having to debug something remotely with minimal (or no) internet access.