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Asked: 2026-05-11T05:09:21+00:00

At Microsoft I can download the Windows Symbol Packages for XP, Vista, Server, even

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At Microsoft I can download the Windows Symbol Packages for XP, Vista, Server, even Windows 7.

My Problem is: how do I use these Symbols with Visual Studio? Where in VS 2008 can I add the downloaded and extracted symbols, so I can debug into Windows itself?

What I want to achieve: I want to debug _beginthreadex/endthreadex, to see why/where some code is losing handles.

I am aware that I can set visual studio 2008 to download source files, but it looks like this only is for .net framework sources?

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  1. The symbol packages are only any use for the version of Windows that you’re currently running — they install into C:\Windows\Symbols, and you can only have one installed at a time.

    Use the Symbol Server instead.

    Symbol Server

    In Visual Studio, go to: Tools / Options / Debugging / Symbols. Add ‘http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols‘ to the Symbol file (.pdb) locations list. You’ll need to enter a cache directory in Cache symbols from symbol servers to this directory:. I use C:\WebSymbols. You’ll plenty of space (I’ve got about 600Mb in mine), although you can clean the directory out periodically.

    This will slow down your debugging sessions initially, until all the symbols you commonly need have been cached.

    Alternatively, you can set this globally for all Windows debuggers by setting the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable to something like this: SRV*C:\WebSymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols.

    You can also (as part of your build process) collect your own .PDB files, using SYMSTORE.EXE (from Debugging Tools for Windows), and add that directory to this list.

    Source Server

    The .PDB files can have an (optional) reference to the source files that they were built from. As you mention, you can use this feature to download .NET sources, but it also works with C++ source files. We annotate our .PDB files with the SVN path and revision of the original source file. When we use ‘Go to Source’, Visual Studio uses SVN to download the exact source code that the EXE was built with. This is really cool.

    To annotate your PDB files, you’ll need the tools from the srcsrv directory in the Debugging Tools for Windows.

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