We are excited to announce that Microsoft Office will begin publishing Office symbols for Windows via the Microsoft Public Symbol Server on August 9th 2022. The publication of Office symbols is a part of our continuing investment to improve security and performance for customers and partners.
Security: Empowering the security community to protect customers
- Symbols provide additional information to better enable security researchers to find and report security issues in our Office products to help protect customers.
- Symbols allow researchers to create more detailed and actionable reports, including stack traces from tools like Process Monitor, WinDbg, or Visual Studio, which help our engineers fix issues faster.
Performance: faster diagnostics and testing
Symbols empower customers and partners to better understand and potentially diagnose issues they’re encountering. They also open the door for the development of more advanced performance tools and insights.
- Independent hardware vendors can use Office public symbols with their own hardware diagnostic environment to performance test and tune their devices.
- Independent software vendors can use Office public symbols with their own software diagnostics environment to performance test and tune their Office dependent software.
- Performance test suites that use Office as a measurement can leverage Office public symbols to provide more tailored performance reporting to their test suite customers.
What are symbols?
Symbol files are created by the compiler when you build your project. Symbol files contain information –
symbols – that the debugger uses while analyzing a program.
