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What is the difference between Release and Debug modes in Visual Studio? [duplicate]

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What is the difference between debug mode and release mode in Visual Studio?

Visual Studio projects have separate release and debug configurations for your program. You build the debug version for debugging and the release version for the final release distribution. In debug configuration, your program compiles with full symbolic debug information and no optimization.

Whats the difference between debug and release?

Debug Mode: When we are developing the application. Release Mode: When we are going to production mode or deploying the application to the server. Debug Mode: The debug mode code is not optimized.

What is the difference between a debug build and a release build?

The Debug configuration of your program is compiled with full symbolic debug information which help the debugger figure out where it is in the source code. Is Release mode is faster than Debug mode ? The Release mode enables optimizations and generates without any debug data, so it is fully optimized. .

What is the difference between debug mode and profile mode?

A quick summary for when to use which mode is as follows: Use debug mode during development, when you want to use hot reload. Use profile mode when you want to analyze performance.


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.


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.


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.