How to view Visual Studio VSP file created on different computer?

Question

I've run the Visual Studio Profiler on my development machine and created a VSP file. On my development machine, the "Function Details" view lets me see the lines of code that are taking long to run. My question is, how do I send this file to someone else without losing functionality?

When I copy just the VSP file to a different computer and try to open it up in Visual Studio, I get some of the functionality, but I can't see any of the code in the "Function Details" view, and instead see "Source code not available. You may not have the appropriate symbol paths or there was an error loading the symbols."

I've tried copying the source and PDB files as well but the same results occur. In the output window, it seems that Visual Studio is trying to look for the PDB files in a path that existed on my development machine, but since it's running on a different computer it can't find them.

Answer 1

You have two options (for more info see MSDN):

1. You can open the report (VSP) once on your development machine because that should automatically serialize symbols for you. You can then copy the modified VSP file to your development machine. OR:
2. You can use the command-line tool vsperfreport.exe to pack symbols on your development machine first.

This should solve any problems with missing PDB files, but in order to see the source code view you will need to have the source files in the same path on your other machine as you do on your development machine.