Performance differences between debug and release builds

Question

I must admit, that usually I haven\'t bothered switching between the Debug and Release configurations in my program, and I have usually opted to go for the

Answer 1

You should never release a .NET Debug build into production. It may contain ugly code to support Edit-and-Continue or who knows what else. As far as I know, this happens only in VB not C# (note: the original post is tagged C#), but it should still give reason to pause as to what Microsoft thinks they are allowed to do with a Debug build. In fact, prior to .NET 4.0, VB code leaks memory proportional to the number of instances of objects with events that you construct in support of Edit-and-Continue. (Though this is reported to be fixed per https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/481671/vb-classes-with-events-are-not-garbage-collected-when-debugging, the generated code looks nasty, creating WeakReference objects and adding them to a static list while holding a lock) I certainly don't want any of this kind of debugging support in a production environment!