Including .pdb files with librarian in Visual Studio

Question

I have a project whose output is a library (.lib). The project depends on a third party library (also a .lib). In order to avoid projects built on top of my library having to worry about this third party dependency, I have used the librarian to include it in mine (Project Properties > Librarian > General > Additional Dependencies).

However, when I build a separate executable project which links to my library, I get a bunch of warnings along the lines of:

MyProject.lib(someThirdPartyObjectFile.obj) : warning LNK4099: PDB 'vc110.pdb' was not found with 'MyProject.lib(someThirdPartyObjectFile.obj)' or at '\vc110.pdb'; linking object as if no debug info

This means (I assume) that I will be able to debug any code belonging to my library, but not to the third party library.

How can I instruct Visual Studio to also include the contents of the third party library's PDB in mine?

Answer 1

The static library has probably been moved, so the compiler can't find the symbols from it. You have several options:

• change debugging format to /Z7, which embeds the debug info in the code (whereas /Zi and /ZI put it in a separate file).
• change the output configuration of the pdb file (for VS2005 it was Settings > C++ > Output Files > Program Database File Name, probably similar in VS2010).

You can find more information here and here.