I've got a VB.net application. Currently the release version of the application is produced without a PDB file. This gives me error logs lacking useful details such as line numbers. I'm looking at including the PDB files with future builds but i'd like to know what the advantages and disadvantages of this are (performance wise, size wise, code security wise)
When you deploy your debug symbols for your application, it becomes really easy for someone to come along and reverse-engineer your work, which some people find undesirable. Likewise, you have to deploy more files and your deployable project gets bigger. The PDB files themselves don't cause the app to get any slower, as shipping a PDB doesn't always preclude forgoing optimizations (you just have to be careful -- the default "Debug" project settings tend to not optimize your outputs when they generate PDBs).