Skip to main content

Azure DevOps Server 2019–Portable PDB

I’m quite confused about the current state of Portable PDBs in combination with Azure DevOps Server.
If you look around on the Internet, the recommendation from Microsoft is to use SourceLink support. So all my projects reference the Microsoft.SourceLink.AzureDevOpsServer.Git NuGet package and have the following settings in the project file:
<PublishRepositoryUrl>true</PublishRepositoryUrl>
<EmbedUntrackedSources>true</EmbedUntrackedSources>
I also added a reference to my Azure DevOps server repo:
<ItemGroup>
  <SourceLinkAzureDevOpsServerGitHost Include="server-name" VirtualDirectory="tfs"/>
</ItemGroup>
More information: https://github.com/dotnet/sourcelink
Inside the documentation they mention the following.
Including PDBs in the .nupkg is generally no longer recommended as it increases the size of the package and thus restore time for projects that consume your package, regardless of whether the user needs to debug through the source code of your library or not
OK, so it is not a good idea to include the pdb in the NuGet package. So let’s publish to a file share as it is not possible yet to publish symbols to your local Azure Artifacts instance(as part of your Azure DevOps Server).
I added the Index Sources and Publish Symbols task to my build pipeline.
If you leave the Index sources checkbox checked, the task will output the following:
Skipping: D:\b\5\_work\50\s\ExampleApp\bin\Release\netcoreapp2.2\Example.pdb because it is a Portable PDB
This does make sense as the indexing is already done by sourcelink. But when I take a look at the publishing part no files are stored 😒
2020-01-14T08:58:54.0211016Z ##[debug]SYMSTORE: Number of files stored = 0
2020-01-14T08:58:54.0230550Z ##[debug]SYMSTORE: Number of errors = 0
2020-01-14T08:58:54.0250084Z ##[debug]SYMSTORE: Number of files ignored = 123
It seems that it is not able to solve this puzzle yet.
I see 2 possible workarounds:
  1. Switching back to Full PDB files, as we are not running on Linux (yet) this would be a good short term solution
  2. Keeping the Portable PDB files, but include them in the NuGet packages.
We decided to go for workaround #2.

Popular posts from this blog

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

VS Code Planning mode

After the introduction of Plan mode in Visual Studio , it now also found its way into VS Code. Planning mode, or as I like to call it 'Hannibal mode', extends GitHub Copilot's Agent Mode capabilities to handle larger, multi-step coding tasks with a structured approach. Instead of jumping straight into code generation, Planning mode creates a detailed execution plan. If you want more details, have a look at my previous post . Putting plan mode into action VS Code takes a different approach compared to Visual Studio when using plan mode. Instead of a configuration setting that you can activate but have limited control over, planning is available as a separate chat mode/agent: I like this approach better than how Visual Studio does it as you have explicit control when plan mode is activated. Instead of immediately diving into execution, the plan agent creates a plan and asks some follow up questions: You can further edit the plan by clicking on ‘Open in Editor’: ...
Read more