How to get StackFrame at compile time from PDB?

Question

I need to get a stack frame of a function from any PDB (All in/out arguments and their types). I have the function name and address of a certain function from PDB, is there a way to get all of the parameters (in/out) of that function from the PDB file?

The functions are written in unmanaged code.

Regards,

Usman

Answer 1

You have a mess of concepts. PDB as any other file doesn't contain stack or stack frames, because it is something that is created during execution. .net exe/dll contains metadata for classes so you can peek at methods signature. You can get stack frames in your code (google class StackFrame/StackFrame) but still you can't all data from the stack like parameters values.

Answer 2

It is not possible to get a stack frame at compile time. The stack is a run time concept.

Answer 3

To extract function names, address and arguments types from a dump, you can use the dia2dump program. It is available as a sample of the Debug Interface Access SDK (dia-sdk). You can find it with Visual 2008 or 2010 under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio (your version)\DIA SDK\Samples\DIA2Dump