One of the first things you will want to do after installing visual studio is to set it up to automatically pull down the correct symbols for system components when debugging. You do this by configuring Visual Studio to use the Microsoft Symbol Sever.
In VS 2005, do the following:
- Open Visual Studio. Goto Tools->Options
- Expand the “Debugging“ node
- Click on the “Symbols“ node under “Debugging“
- Click on the icon that looks like the new folder icon to add a new .pdb location
- Type the following for the location “smysrv*symsrv.dll*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/downloads/symbols“
- In the Cache symbols from symbol servers to this directory, enter the local path you used in step 5. In this case “c:\symbols“
- Click Ok.
To test it out, try attaching to some windows process like iexplore.exe (if you have IE running). Goto debug->windows->modules. You should now see that symbols are loaded for all the system dlls and iexplore.exe. You can also open the local path used in step 5 and you should see folders for all the dlls that have been debugged so far.
Happy Debugging!