dotPeek 2016.3 Help

Navigate To Sources from Symbol Files

Navigate | Navigate To | Sources from Symbol Files
Ctrl+Shift+G | Sources from Symbol Files

This command tries to fetch the original source file of a library symbol and display the symbol there. The command becomes available when you invoke Navigate To on a library symbol in your source code and on decompiled sources. You can invoke this command from the code viewer, from the File Structure window and other tool windows.

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It may take some time while dotPeek downloads the required files from the symbol server; in this case, you will see the download progress.

To successfully execute this command, PDB information should be available for the target assembly. dotPeek uses two approaches to search for the PDB:

  • It searches for PDB locally, in the same directory where the target assembly is located.
  • If it fails to find the PDB there, it looks it up on a symbol server using the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable.
    Some companies publish parts of their sources using symbol servers (source servers). For example, Microsoft uses this technology to provide access to the source code of the .NET Framework. If the symbol server for the target PDB is available, this command can access sources stored that way.

To make dotPeek aware of available symbol servers, you need to specify them in the _NT_SYMBOL_PATH environment variable. dotPeek will look for symbol files and download them from the specified locations.

This feature is inspired by and borrowed from JetBrains ReSharper, a developer productivity tool for Microsoft Visual Studio.

See Also

Last modified: 3 April 2017