Debugger Source Symbol Improvements to Visual Studio 2012

Microsoft recently announced Visual Studio 2012 Update 1. If you are using Visual Studio 2012 for your development, you should install Update 1. It has many fixes and improvements. 

One of the improvements is debugger source symbol improvements.

In his blog, Tarun Arora talks about this improvement. 

The improvements can be broken down into 4 buckets:

  • Performance Improvements
  • No Source Landing Page
  • Load Symbols Context Menu
  • Source Symbol Dialog

Performance Improvements

Significant performance gain has been achieved by,

  • Caching symbols aggressively
  • Detecting bad symbol paths to bail out earlier

Previously a bad symbol path caused at least a 30 seconds delay before the request was timed out. The debugger is now tuned to identify cases causing long and unnecessary symbol loading delays such as a symbol server not being available, bad cache path, incorrect symbol server location, etc. The improvement makes it so that once a "bad situation" has been detected, the debugger will spend no more than a few seconds to time out. On average, 30 second time-outs have been reduced to just 3s once the problem is detected.

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