How to read details of a PDB file in C#

Question

I wanted to read details like the document URLs (=the paths of the documents) from a PDB-file (in my specific case a Windows PDB and not a portable PDB), but couldn't find an easy and straight forward example.

Answer 1

After some research I came up with the following, and I just want to share it, as some post like that would have been what I was looking for in the first place:

1. Add a package reference to Microsoft.DiaSymReader.Native
2. Create a helper class like the following. At the moment this is just reading and returning the document paths, but of course we could also extract several other details as well.

Important:

• Unsafe code must be allowed in the project for this to work.
• Also note that these are the steps for Windows PDBs (not portable PDBs).

    /// <summary>
    /// Helper class to get specific contents of a PDB file.
    /// </summary>
    public static class PdbReader
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Gets all paths of all documents from the given PDB.
        /// </summary>
        public static IReadOnlyCollection<string> GetAllDocumentPathsFromPdb(string path)
        {
            using var stream = new FileStream(path, FileMode.Open);
            var metadataProvider = new SymReaderMetadataProvider();
            var reader = SymUnmanagedReaderFactory.CreateReader<ISymUnmanagedReader5>(stream, metadataProvider);
            var result = reader.GetDocuments();

            return GetDocumentPaths(result).ToList();
        }

        private static IEnumerable<string> GetDocumentPaths(IEnumerable<ISymUnmanagedDocument> result)
        {
            foreach (var document in result)
            {
                var url = new char[256];
                document.GetUrl(url.Length, out var count, url);
                yield return new string(url, 0, count-1);
            }
        }

        /// <summary>
        /// Dummy implementation which is doing nothing.
        /// At the moment we just need it to pass *any* implementation of <see cref="ISymReaderMetadataProvider"/>
        /// to <see cref="SymUnmanagedReaderFactory.CreateReader{T}"/>.
        /// </summary>
        private class SymReaderMetadataProvider : ISymReaderMetadataProvider
        {
            public unsafe bool TryGetStandaloneSignature(int standaloneSignatureToken, out byte* signature, out int length)
            {
                throw new NotImplementedException();
            }

            public bool TryGetTypeDefinitionInfo(int typeDefinitionToken, out string namespaceName, out string typeName, out TypeAttributes attributes)
            {
                throw new NotImplementedException();
            }

            public bool TryGetTypeReferenceInfo(int typeReferenceToken, out string namespaceName, out string typeName)
            {
                throw new NotImplementedException();
            }
        }
    }

Credits: The biggest help was this file. Thanks Kirill Osenkov!