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When compiling a library or an application (e.g a Console Application in the Visual Studio IDE), in the Debug folder of the application, apart from the .dll or .exe, there will be one more file with extension ".pdb".
What is the exact usage of this .pdb file?
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Program database (PDB) is a file format (developed by Microsoft) for storing debugging information about a program (or, commonly, program modules such as a DLL or EXE). PDB files commonly have a . pdb extension. A PDB file is typically created from source files during compilation.
The easiest way to use the PDB file is to let Visual Studio do the heavy lifting - either launch your program with Visual Studio's "Debug" command (F5 by default), or run the program and use the "Attach to Process" item in Visual Studio's Debug menu.
A program database file (extension . pdb) is a binary file that contains type and symbolic debugging information gathered over the course of compiling and linking the project. A PDB file is created when you compile a C/C++ program with /ZI or /Zi or a Visual Basic, Visual C#, or JScript program with the /debug option.
A typical PDB formatted file includes a large "header" section of text that summarizes the protein, citation information, and the details of the structure solution, followed by the sequence and a long list of the atoms and their coordinates.
PDBs contain debugging symbols, so you can ship a compiled binary to your customer without exposing your source code algorithms and other private details to them.
If your app goes wrong on a customer site, you can get a crash dump from them (using DrWatson), bring it back to your dev workstation and debug the crash, the debugger will use the symbols file in conjunction with the crash to show you the source code, data structures etc. In many cases, all you have to do is open the crash dump and the debugger will take you directly to the source code of the exception, and show you variables and threads too.
That's the primary use of them, they're invaluable when a customer reports a crash. The things you need to know about using them though - they are only valid for the build that created them, so if you recompile, your symbols file is next to worthless.
John Robbins has an excellent article why you would use them.
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John Robbins has written some really great articles on PDBs lately:
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