Oh boy, what have I taken on?

Going deeper and deeper into any documentation I can find about how one goes about source indexing. I have no idea what I’ve signed up for.

In my C:Program FilesDebugging Tools for Windowssdksrcsrv directory there is an excellent source server document that walks through the steps and for the moment all I know is that I’ll be needing Perl.

So I’m downloading ActivePerl as I write this and hopefully once it’s installed I can chip away at setting up some indexing scripts.

Well, thanks to Peter McIntyre (Resident Windows Genius) at Seneca College, I have now managed to set up my local symbol server.

Peter actually sent me a link to information about configuring IIS 6.0 but it turned out I had 5.1 – no problem he had given me enough so that a quick Google was all it took to find this script to which I merely added “.pdb”, “application/octet-stream” and voila – my MIME map is updated. Now my localhost symbol server can serve up .pdb files without a hitch.

Started up Minefield, attached to VStudio and the symbols loaded up as smooth as can be.

Small success leads to much dancing around with the hound dog.

In other news, finished part 1 of the IBM “Master the Mainframe” contest (if anyone wants to do it, register using Peter as your Faculty person) and am slowly working through part 2…with breaks for reading up on bugs. I still find the whole bugzilla environment quite daunting, it’s like that feeling that everyone else knows what they’re doing except me. This is me, peering around the corner and listening in…

After today’s IRC chat with luser, I now have a list of things to do in order to acheive 0.1:

• set up a localhost server
• make buildsymbols from my own build
• load those symbols onto the local server
• connect them up to my debugger to make sure it all works
• get the microsoft scripts to work adding source code to my local pdb files
• so that the debugger can access the source code from being pointed to my server

Starting off, I set up IIS on my computer so that I can have a localhost webserver. This was a bit tricky with some unexpected authentication issues but I think that I have it working now. If I point my browser to http://localhost/symbolServer/ I have a directory of the pdb files that I created by calling make buildsymbols in my objdir.

The next move was to point my debugger (Visual Studio 2005) to the localhost symbol server. However, this is where I got stuck. I could load up the microsoft symbols but it would skip right over my firefox ones.

So I’m going back to square 1. I’m rebuilding with debug disabled because this may be a part of the issue. If this doesn’t work I need to look into either a) symbol server directory structure because maybe I’m missing something about the hierarchy or b) perhaps my IIS set-up authentication issues are preventing VStudio from accessing the symbols.

Of course, in the back of my head I know it could also be c) something else entirely.

Back to the building.