I’m a long time fan of John Robbins’ work, and over the years I’ve followed his blog, MSDN column and purchased several of his excellent debugging books.
He posted a must read blog entry that I meant to mention a while back: PDB Files: What Every Developer Must Know.
Here’s a snippet:
The most important thing all developers need to know: PDB files are as important as source code! …
At a minimum, every development shop must set up a Symbol Server … Briefly, a Symbol Server stores the PDBs and binaries for all your public builds. That way no matter what build someone reports a crash or problem, you have the exact matching PDB file for that public build the debugger can access. Both Visual Studio and WinDBG know how to access Symbol Servers and if the binary is from a public build, the debugger will get the matching PDB file automatically.