What is the difference between Release and Debug modes in Visual Studio

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Possible Duplicate     Debug vs  release in  NET    Debug Release difference      What is the difference between Release and Debug modes in Visual Studio while building a project

User · Answer

The main difference is when compiled in debug mode  pdb files are also created which allow debugging  so you can step through the code when its running    This however means that the code isn t optimized as much

User · Answer

Debug and Release are just labels for different solution configurations  You can add others if you want  A project I once worked on had one called  Debug Internal  which was used to turn on the in-house editing features of the application  You can see this if you go to Configuration Manager     it s on the Build menu   You can find more information on MSDN Library under Configuration Manager Dialog Box   Each solution configuration then consists of a bunch of project configurations  Again  these are just labels  this time for a collection of settings for your project  For example  our C   library projects have project configurations called  Debug    Debug Unicode    Debug MT   etc   The available settings depend on what type of project you re building  For a  NET project  it s a fairly small set   defines and a few other things  For a C   project  you get a much bigger variety of things to tweak   In general  though  you ll use  Debug  when you want your project to be built with the optimiser turned off  and when you want full debugging symbol information included in your build  in the  PDB file  usually   You ll use  Release  when you want the optimiser turned on  and when you don t want full debugging information included

User · Answer

Well  it depends on what language you are using  but in general they are 2 separate configurations  each with its own settings  By default  Debug includes debug information in the compiled files  allowing easy debugging  while Release usually has optimizations enabled   As far as conditional compilation goes  they each define different symbols that can be checked in your program  but they are language-specific macros

[visual-studio] What is the difference between Release and Debug modes in Visual Studio?

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