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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T17:58:58+00:00

.Net assemblies have pdb files for debugging. The PDB file points to the exact

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.Net assemblies have pdb files for debugging. The PDB file points to the exact source location among other details. This is good if I am building the assembly and debugging it locally. The problem starts when you need to deploy your assemblies on other computers. Debugging in such scenarios can be accomplished in a couple of ways; 1. You could put the source in a shared location and point to the location when VS asks for it 2. You could use Source server and point to the source control and configure VS to use that

Java has source jars that could be just deployed on alongside the actual jar itself and use it for debugging. This seems a simpler and neater solution. Can we do this with .Net (I know sourcepack provides a similar functionality)? Or are there better/simpler solution options for this?

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  1. Editorial Team

    PDB are actually not need for .NET Assemblies! PDB files do NOT point to the exact source location, it only contains the GUID of the associated source file!

    See more details about how PDB and sources files are linked

    See John Robbins for more information….

    A .NET PDB only contains two pieces of information, the source file names and their lines and the local variable names. All the other information is already in the .NET metadata so there is no need to duplicate the same information in a PDB file.

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