Release generating .pdb files, why?
Why does Visual Studio 2005 generate the .pdb files when compiling in release? I won't be debugging a release build, so why are they generated? Cody Gray Because without the PDB files, it would be impossible to debug a "Release" build by anything other than address-level debugging. Optimizations really do a number on your code, making it very difficult to find the culprit if something goes wrong (say, an exception is thrown). Even setting breakpoints is extremely difficult, because lines of source code cannot be matched up one-to-one with (or even in the same order as) the generated assembly