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Why is there a pdb file in my release directory?

When I create a version of the release project in Visual Studio 2008, it creates a .pdb file, for example. for a simple WPF project, it generates .exe and .pdb files.

I always understood .pdb files for debugging , so I expected that they would be in the Debug folder , but not in the Release folder .

And looking back at other StackOverflow questions, it doesn't seem like the pdb files work well with the Release version .

Why are pdb files generated in the default Release folder, and how to disable this feature?

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You're right. PDB files are for debugging purposes, but you may also need to debug release builds. Saving PDBs of released assemblies is very important if you want to debug a client problem and you have an emergency dump file associated with this problem.

By the way, creating PDB files does not harm compiler optimization. If you do not send it to the customer, there will be no performance impact.

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It depends on the project settings. It just happens that the release version also generates .pdb by default. It will not hurt you - just do not send it to the client.

To skip creating it, go to Linker-> Debugging in the project settings and set "Generate Debug Information" to "No".

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