Debugging Database in Release Build

Question

I've done something wrong and now my application, which runs perfectly when built in Debugging configuration gets Access Violation when built in Release configuration.
I would like to run the Release build in the debugger to see what's going on but Visual Studio says it can't find the PDB file.
There is a PDB file with the correct name and creation date in the solution Release directory. When I try to browse to it in the debugger, the debugger says "A matching symbol file was not found in this folder."
How can I get Visual Studio to generate a PDB file that will work?
I'm using Visual Studio Express 2012 version 11.0.61030.00 Update 4.
Thanks,
Norm

Answer 1

Your suggestion is probably correct in the general case; it seems that whenever the Visual Studio IDE does something strange you fix it by deleting all the output files and doing a clean rebuild.
However, in this case I did something that the IDE couldn't have anticipated and that caused the problem.
My solution contains two EXE projects; bccr and cmd.bccr. In the Release configuration I went to the project properties for cmd.bccr and changed the name of the result file from "cmd.bccr.exe" to "bccr.com" in only the Release configuration.
Now the IDE is creating two result files with a filename of "bccr" and for each of them it creates a PDB file named bccr.PDB. If cmd.bccr is built
after bccr it overwrites the PDB file for bccr.exe and the debugger cannot use it to debug bccr.exe.
(cmd.bccr creates a console application. I'm doing this so that the installer can put both bccr.exe and bccr.com in the same directory under Program Files and the path search when the user enters "bccr" at the command prompt will find bccr.com.)
I have solved the problem in Visual Studio by changing the cmd.bccr property back to the default "cmd.bccr.exe". I'll have to change the name of the result EXE file manually.
Norm
Norm