Diffrence between Debug and Release mode in Asp.net

Today i am going to cover a very basic concept that is Debug and Release mode in Visual studio.Many programmer often use debug mode that is default mode in visual studio.

Here is the folder structure that you will find in your project/application root directory.

The main question is that what are these and when to use them?

Debug and Release mode are basically configuration for application build using .Net framework.

Debug mode

Debug mode is actually used then programmer/developer is working in developing/local environment where he/she need to debug the program by breaking the code in several steps. It means in debug mode there are several information included that helps programmer while code debugging.If you carefuly looked the bin folder compling the code in debug mode you will find several .pdb extension file (portable database file).

These .pdb files hold the debugging and project state information that allows linking of a debug configuration of your program. A .pdb is created when you compile a VB.Net or C# program with debug mode.Here is some key points to be remember-

• It is less optimized code because it contains additional details regarding programming
• Some additional instructions are added to enable the developer to set breakpoints on every source code line.
• More memory is used by the source code at run time.
• Scripts & images downloaded by webresource.axd are not cached.
• It has big size, and runs slower.

Release mode

Whenever  the application is ready to deploy then developer use release mode to compile the application and generate the application DLL 

libraries.Uses of release mode has having lots of advantages over debugging mode.

• It is more optimized code as compared to debug mode
• Some additional instructions are removed and developer can’t set a breakpoint on every source code line.
• Less memory is used by the source code at runtime.
• Scripts & images downloaded by webresource.axd are cached.
• It has small size, and runs fast.

Hope this tutorial is helpful.Provide for feedback.

Thanks.