Visual Studio 2012 ignores symbol locations

Question

I have disabled "Microsoft Symbol Servers" and added path to .NET 4.5 symbols (W:\Debug\RefSrc\Symbols) that I downloaded from http://referencesource.microsoft.com/.

Unfortunately when I force loading of symbols, for example on mscorlib.dll, Visual Studio ignores this folder and proceeds to download symbol file from symbol server. They end up in W:\Debug\SymbolsCache\MicrosoftPublicSymbols and are exactly identical to those in RefSrc.

Is anyone else seeing this behavior ?

My debug settings:

[ ] Enable Just my code
[ ] Enable .NET framework source stepping
[ ] Enable source server support

I had to disable ".NET framework source stepping" because of this.

Answer 1

don't know how you do it in VS 2012 because I never tried it and now I don't have VS 2012, but the way I do it in VS 2010 is the following:

1. Debug - from main menu
2. Options and settings
3. Debugging -> General
4. Check Enable .NET Framework Source Stepping and uncheck Enable Just My Code
5. Go to Debugging -> Symbols
6. Pick a location for "Cache symbols in this directory"
7. Check the Microsoft Symbol Servers
8. Ok
9. Start your application in Debug mode
10. Go to Debug menu item and choose Windows->Modules
11. Press F11 to step into Microsoft .NET Framework code (the one that is public, because from as far as I know not all is)

Hope this helps you a bit. I would disable Enable just my code. Also, if I remember correctly, is possible to select from where to load the symbols when you open the Modules window, by right clicking on the item you want to load the sources for.If the pdb file does not correspond to the binary file, it won't load the symbols if the versions are not the same.