Is there any reason to not ship the pdb's with your application?

Question

Since you can use reflector to reverse-engineer a .Net app, is there any reason to NOT ship the pdb files with the app? If you do ship them with it, then your stack trace will include the line number with the problem, which is useful if it crashes.

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Answer 1

Shipping pdb does not give any additional convenience to an user. So there are no reasons to ship pdb files with the app. Besides pdb file usually has a large size.

Instead of shipping pdb files you should use a local Microsoft Symbol Server for a fast access to pdb files corresponding to error reports. Here you can find the detailed explanation how to use Symbol Server.