Hi Les,

Thank you for the feedback.

This depends on your requirement. There are 2 types of debugging: source
code level and binary level(without source code). So, do you have the
source code for the 3rd party product?

If you have source code for it, you also have to obtain the private symbol
file from the 3rd party vendor. The debugger has no knowledge to determine
if a set of source files are associated with which assembly, so it must
first load the private symbol file for the symbol. The private symbol file
internally contains the source code path in it. So, you should set the
symbol path to the private symbol file in Tools ->Options ->Debugging
->Symbols. Note: this debugging has nothing to do with debug or release
mode. As I stated in the original post, the debug mode only does few/no
optimize with the generated assembly. It has nothing to do with debugging.

It is always good to have source code for debugging. However, since the
assembly is a 3rd party product, you may not have source code for it. That
is the reason of using binary level debugging.(Another example is debugging
.Net Framework BCL, whose source code is also not available) Even you do
not have source code, you may just perform binary level debugging with it,
since the .Net assembly metadata can self-describe its code/data. So you
can still get the full stack trace of this hang. The stack method will be
displayed in call stack window by querying the metadata.

I am not sure if my explanation has resolved your confusion. If I have
misunderstood your key concern, please feel free to tell me and explain
your concern in details. Thanks.

Best regards,
Jeffrey Tan
Microsoft Online Community Support
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