Symbol Server Transaction Manager

Symbol Servers are one of the most important, but sadly, least utilized debugging tools you have. Getting the right symbols lined up every time so you can get perfect call stacks is critical to quickly debugging a problem verses guessing forever at the problem. Combine a Symbol Server with a Source Server and you have complete debugging nirvana!

While the Debugging Tools for Windows package comes with all the tools to manage your Symbol Server and Source Server, it’s a bit on how shall we say it, rudimentary side. I have been saying for a long time that someone needs to write a UI front end to make it pick and choose which transactions to delete. Being too lazy to do that myself I’ve been issuing the challenge for someone to do that for a while. Aaron Lerch rose to the challenge and wrote Symbol Server Transaction Manager. If you’ve wrestled with deleting files from a Symbol Server manually, you can now do it graphically, which is a whole lot easier.

Aaron says he’s interested in feedback so if you have ideas, post them to his blog. The one thing I’d like to see is the ability to mark a transaction as undeletable. That way you can lock specific transactions as special, such as milestones and betas, so you don’t lose those symbols.