Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@jbevain
Last active November 16, 2023 12:11
Show Gist options
  • Star 61 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 6 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save jbevain/ba23149da8369e4a966f to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save jbevain/ba23149da8369e4a966f to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
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.
@xgalaxy
Copy link

xgalaxy commented Nov 13, 2015

Thank you!

@Tichau
Copy link

Tichau commented Nov 24, 2015

Thanks !

@BBI-YggyKing
Copy link

Thanks @jbevain, is this the latest and greatest pdb2mdb.exe? Is there a more "official" place to get it from? Should we use the one that comes with Unity? (Unity 5.2.3 includes it, I believe it may have been omitted from some of the earlier 5.x releases.)

@azaz569
Copy link

azaz569 commented Mar 7, 2016

let me see see

@svermeulen
Copy link

@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
Copy link

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
Copy link

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
Copy link

TMPxyz commented Jan 11, 2017

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

@shravan2x
Copy link

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
Copy link

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
Copy link

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
Copy link

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
Copy link
Author

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
Copy link

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

@mokkbs
Copy link

mokkbs commented Aug 17, 2020

I confirm this works with 2017.4.40 and VS 2019

@sdporres
Copy link

sdporres commented Mar 9, 2021

Thank you, this is terrific.

@bodong1987
Copy link

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
Copy link

I really appreciate this, thank you.

@Sakyce
Copy link

Sakyce commented Jul 19, 2023

Got a System.OutOfMemoryException :(

@StudioLE
Copy link

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>

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment