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@jbevain
Last active November 16, 2023 12:11
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pdb2mdb for Visual Studio 2015

The Visual Studio Tools for Unity are able to convert .NET debug symbol files (namely pdb files) to debug symbols files that are understood by Unity's scripting engine (namely .dll.mdb files) when importing both the .dll and the .pdb in the Assets folder.

If you prefer to handle the conversion yourself you need to call a tool named pdb2mdb on the .dll associated with the .pdb:

pdb2mdb MyLibrary.dll

Will produce a MyLibrary.dll.mdb usable on Unity if MyLibrary.pdb is present.

The .pdb files generated by Visual Studio 2015 can contain new informations that are not handled by the pdb2mdb file shipped by Unity.

You can download below the version that VSTU is using which handles the new 2015 format. This executable is self-contained and embeds all the references it needs, namely Mono.Cecil.

License Information:

  • pdb2mdb is licensed under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL).
  • Mono.Cecil is licensed under the MIT/X11.
@svermeulen
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@yoyobbi I've tested this with Unity 5.3.4f1 and found that it works as expected (ie. stack traces contain extra debug info). This was after I failed to get any of the versions of pdb2mdb.exe that come with that version of Unity to work

@BBI-YggyKing
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I've confirmed that this works with Unity 5.2.3f1, with both Visual Studio 2015 and 2013. It would be nice if this could be distributed directly with Visual Studio Tools For Unity.

We will continue to do the PDB conversion explicitly because the automatic conversion when DLL's are imported into Unity did not work reliably for us. We have dozens of DLL's in our project, and only about half of them had their PDB files converted. Selecting both the DLL and it's PDB and reimporting explicitly did generate the MDB, but we cannot rely on this manual process.

@mikaelhogstrom
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Just tested it no unity 5.4 and it works. Strange that it is not included in the standard tools. Took me quite some time to figure out that it was the upgrade from VS2013 to VS2015 that had caused the mdb files to stop generating correctly... At least a warning message if you are on the worng version would be nice.

@TMPxyz
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TMPxyz commented Jan 11, 2017

Thanks for the great tool. Works fine on Unity5.5.0f3.

@shravan2x
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shravan2x commented May 24, 2017

Still works in May 2017 with VS2017 and Mono 5.0.

@jbevain I'm making a quick-n-easy GUI tool for this. Would you be able to update the official pdb2mdb NuGet package?

EDIT: The GUI tool lives at https://github.com/shravan2x/Pdb2Mdb-GUI.

@reyou
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reyou commented May 28, 2017

For some reason, after re-installing of VS 2017, my pdb2mdb.exe disappeared from C:\ drive. My build was failing. This tool fixed my issue. Thanks!

@dseshadri
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Could you help me point to the source code from where this version of PDB2MDB was built? I am trying to build the latest version from the mono repository, but i am facing a problem with my version. However, this Executable works great. So, i just need the same version from where this was built.

@benclewett
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Seems not to work any more. For instance:

mono pdb2mdb.exe Newtonsoft.Json.dll
Fatal error:
System.IndexOutOfRangeException: Array index is out of range.

Or is it just me?

@jbevain
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jbevain commented Jun 5, 2019

@benclewett, that's probably because of the new portable pdb format. That binary is for the old PDB «native» format.

@tomaszkot
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I got some hard time trying to get breakpoints working on Unity19.3/VS2017, this exe helped me, thx!

@mokkbs
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mokkbs commented Aug 17, 2020

I confirm this works with 2017.4.40 and VS 2019

@sdporres
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sdporres commented Mar 9, 2021

Thank you, this is terrific.

@bodong1987
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I create a new pdb2mdb, because this pdb2mdb.exe will throw exception in my case( Microsoft.Cci.Pdb.PdbDebugException: Invalid signature. (sig=1919117645) ),
if you have the same exception, you can try this:https://github.com/sczybt/pdb2mdb

@maikgreubel
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I really appreciate this, thank you.

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ghost commented Jul 19, 2023

Got a System.OutOfMemoryException :(

@StudioLE
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Modern C# projects will generate a portable .pdb file which isn't compatible with pdb2mdb to generate the old full .pdb format add the following to your .csproj

<PropertyGroup Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == 'Debug' ">
  <DebugType>Full</DebugType>
</PropertyGroup>

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