Do you have to deploy the .pdb file with compiling under release?

Question

Do you have to deploy the .pdb file with compiling under release?

Why does it even compile a .pdb when you do a release build anyway?

Answer 1

a PDB file contains information about names of functions. You need it to be able to get a stack trace. It can also contain information about mapping it to sources. Sometimes you might want to ship your release version, and still need to analyze a crash that occurs on the client side. For that, the PDB is needed. The PDB when compiling for release should in theory have less information than when compiling for debug.