Some time ago, we set up a symbol server for our Windows builds. This was sort of an afterthought, it just happened to be really easy to do in our new crash reporting architecture. It turns out that this is incredibly useful for people. This shouldn’t be surprising, given how difficult it is to build your own Firefox. Some time after we set this up, I found out that Microsoft’s debuggers also supported something called a source server (Note: this page did not contain this much information when this project started). This sounded interesting, but it wasn’t something I had time to work on, so I added some information to Seneca’s wiki, hoping an interested student would pick it up as a class project.

To say that I got more than I hoped for would be an understatement. Lukas Blakk took the project and ran with it, producing a working prototype and fleshing it out to the point where it now works perfectly on current nightly builds. She’s done an incredible job working with a practically undocumented feature of Microsoft’s debugging tools and having the perseverance to stick it out. As a result, you can now debug nightly Windows builds with full source available. We’ve got a handy MDC document available to tell you how. You’ll need a nightly from today (April 15th) or newer, and this will be available in the Firefox 3.0 release builds. Happy debugging!

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