Why does the Stack Trace shows my development files path?

Question

Visual Studio 2010 SP1, compiled WCF app, put it on a server, and of course it got an error on the first run (what's new), outputted Stack Trace to log file.

It's seeing the path to my development environment. Why? Is it because I deployed it as Debug compared to Release or is there something else, or shall I be more careful about outputting Stack Traces regardless?

04/09/2012 03:58:46: Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.    at App1.Logging.LogMessageToFile(String msg, Boolean isUsingClickOnceApp) in C:\Users\robcube\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\AppWebService\App1\Logging.cs:line 63
   at App1.App1Main.ConnectWebService(String description) in C:\Users\robcube\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\AppWebService\App1\International.cs:line 40
04/09/2012 03:58:46: Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.    at App1.App1Main.UpdateActivityLog(String data, String userName, Boolean deleteData, Int64 firstId, Int64 lastId, String changeType) in C:\Users\robcube\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\AppWebService\App1\App1Main.cs:line 641

Thanks, -rob

Answer 1

It is because you copied the .pdb files as well as the executables. The CLR will look for them when it generates a stack trace to try to give as much info as possible about the stack frames in the trace. The .pdb stores the source file name and line number.

You are supposed to deploy the Release build of your code. That enables optimizations that can make your code run a lot faster. You can still copy the .pdb files for that build, they normally have that debug info stripped. Project + Properties, switch to the Release build, Build, Advanced, "Debug Info" setting. The normal setting here for release builds is "pdb-only" instead of "full". Which implies that source file and line number is not included. Which makes sense, stack traces tend to be a bit unreliable after the jitter has optimized the code.