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Bart

Software Engineer - Red Gate Software

.NET Reflector Support: Does .NET Reflector lock assemblies and/or PDB files?

Published Thursday, July 30, 2009 7:20 PM

No. If you're having problems with assemblies and/or PDBs being locked, the likely culprit is Visual Studio, assuming you have it open at the same time as .NET Reflector. The problem seems like it might be more prevalent with Visual Studio 2005 than Visual Studio 2008.

The PDB files are actually locked by the Visual Studio hosting process for your startup project. The screenshot below illustrates the presence of this process for one of our projects:

The Visual Studio hosting process for one of our projects in Windows Task Manager.

The hosting process locks the PDBs when you start debugging. To force it to release its lock on the PDB files you just need to rebuild your solution.

You may also find that disabling the Visual Studio hosting process is helpful, although be aware that if you do this, it will take longer for the debugger to start up. To disable the hosting process, right-click on the startup project in your Visual Studio solution, and click Properties on the context menu. Then go to the Debug tab. It should look something like this:

Start-up project Debug properties, showing how to enable/disable the Visual Studio hosting process.

Now just uncheck Enable the Visual Studio hosting process, save your project, and you're done.

by Bart Read
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Comments

 

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About Bart Read

Bart has done many things since he started work at Red Gate Software Ltd in August 2004, but nowadays he's (mainly) the product manager for the .NET Developer Tools. He still feels like this is a bit like admitting you were cheering for the Empire whilst watching Star Wars, but for now he's along for the ride. In a previous incarnation he was a project manager leading the .NET Reflector Pro, ANTS Memory Profiler 5, ANTS Performance Profiler 4 & 5, and SQL Prompt 3.0 - 3.6 projects. He still occasionally writes some code and, in the past, has touched the code for most of the Red Gate SQL developer tools... some of them still haven't recovered from the shock. He was born and grew up in Dorset, was educated in Nottingham and London, and likes music and real ale. His photo is extremely misleading.
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