Take the 2-minute tour ×  Why on earth does Visual Studio 2005
generate the .pdb files when compiling in release? I won't be
debugging a release build, so why are they generated?
share|improve this question Why generate pdb in realease? So
when a crash report comes in from the wild you have information
to debug it. The other value is that customers can debug it when
the original author won't. –  Ian Boyd Feb 12 '12 at 18:14  5
Answers 5  up vote 214 down vote accepted  Because without the
PDB files, it would be impossible to debug a release build by
anything other than address-level debugging. Optimizations
really do a number on your code, making it very difficult to
find the culprit if something goes wrong (say, an exception is
thrown). PDB files help you out with that.  You make the point
that if your software is ready for release, you should have done
all your debugging by then. While that's certainly true, there
are a couple of important points to keep in mind:    1. You
should also test and debug your a