Question

I have a web application that works fine on my development machine but when I install it on another machine, it just crashes on one of the new methods I added to a DLL.

Looking deeper into it, the installed does not take the PDB files whereas they are on my dev machine. So I tried to remove them on the dev machine and my new method crashes the same. Other methods don’t crash at all.

My method just throws up a “NullPointerException” that never comes up when the PDB files are present.

I know what the PDB files are for (I searched this site before posting) but this should not alter the way the application works. Should it?

EDIT: Forgot to mention that all is in <release> not <debug>. That is why I question about the PDB files.

Answer 1

I found what is going wrong in my code.
In the logger part, using log4Net, I have code like this:

public static void Info(string strMsg)
{
    StackTrace st = new StackTrace(true);
    StackFrame sf = st.GetFrame(1);
    _log.Info(string.Format("{0,-25} L{1:0000} {2}", sf.GetFileName().Substring(sf.GetFileName().LastIndexOf(@"\") + 1), sf.GetFileLineNumber(), strMsg));
}

So I changed the entries to something like this:

public static void Debug(string strMsg)
{
    StackTrace st = new StackTrace(true);
#if DEBUG
    StackFrame sf = st.GetFrame(1);
    _log.Debug(string.Format("{0,-25} L{1:0000} {2}", sf.GetFileName().Substring(sf.GetFileName().LastIndexOf(@"\") + 1), sf.GetFileLineNumber(), strMsg));
#else
    _log.Debug(string.Format("{0}",strMsg));
#endif            
}

And now all works fine without the PDB files.
So picking information from the stacktrace requires PDB files.