what is this 'incremental linker file' included in a MSVC debug folder?

Question

recently i started learning c++. Am using MSVC 2010 as my IDE since i will be creating apps for windows platform. I would like to know what is this 'incremental linker file' and 'program debug database' files found in the debug folder of a project.

http://gyazo.com/f3e48ecf9394c192f7fb90b31ed71c91.png

Answer 1

Short answer: Don't remove them unless you're really, really short of disk space.

Long answer:

• The Incremental Linker files (*.ilk) are used by the linker to speed up the generation of your app (.exe) or library (.lib). When your project has 100 files and only one changes, you'll be happy of this quicken.

• The Program Debug Database (*.pdb) are only useful in Debug builds. They allow you to debug your program step by step, stepping in a function call and seeing what's going on inside over the original C++ source code instead of assembler. This also works when building libs and linking them into other projects: you can peek into the library functions, while debugging another app. Really useful.