VB - .NET - Visual Studio 2005 - programming - coding - termimology and other issues, assistance needed please

Requesting answers that will be intuitive to a programming semi-illiterate.





I have inherited a VS 2005 project from an individual who left the company unexpectedly. I'm not an experienced programmer and I'm trying to see if the application he was building is working.





QUESTIONS:





What is meant by the following:





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'loadABCV3.vshost.exe' (Managed): Loaded 'C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\Image_Load\LCIS_load鈥?Symbols loaded.


'loadABCV3.vshost.exe' (Managed): Loaded 'C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\Image_Load\LCIS_load鈥?No symbols loaded.





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In .NET programming speak (in VB context, if/where it matters), what is meant by:





- ';Symbols loaded';? Does this indicated that some aspect or component of the application has run successfully?





- ';No symbols loaded';? Does this indicated that some aspect or component of the application did NOT run successfully?





Thanks!!VB - .NET - Visual Studio 2005 - programming - coding - termimology and other issues, assistance needed please
Compiled code is essentially just a series of instructions to the CPU, calls to external libraries, and maybe some data. Normally what you see in the source code is not really recognizable in the compiled code. Symbols (or ';debugging symbols'; as they are often called) are the original function names and variable names from your source code that can be compiled into your executable (or otherwise referenced from another file such as a symbol database file), so that you can hook a debugger up to your compiled code, step through it, and have half a clue what it's doing.





Normally a ';debug build'; contains symbols, and a ';release build'; does not.





If something loads without symbols, it probably means that you've fired up a release build that is ready to be given out to the world. This does not mean that anything failed or that anything is wrong with this build.