Why have separate Debug and Release folders in Visual Studio?

Question

By default, of course, Visual Studio creates separate bin folders for Debug and Release builds. We are having some minor issues dealing with those from the perspective of ex

Answer 1

Dave, if you will compile Debug and Release to single folder, you may encounter the situation where some dll-s will not be recompiled after switching from Release to Debug and vice versa because dll files will be newer than source files. Yes, the "Rebuild" should help you, but if you forget this - you can have a few extra hours of debugging.

Answer 2

Occasionally one may run into a particularly-nasty uninitialized memory problem that only occurs with a release build. If you are unable to maintain (as ChrisF suggests) separate names for your debug vs. release binaries it's really easy to loose track of which binary you're currently using.

Additionally, you may find yourself tweaking the compiler settings (i.e. optimization level, release-with-debug symbols for easy profiling, etc.) and it's much easier to keep these in order with separate folders.

It's all a matter of personal preference though - which is why Visual Studio makes it easy to change the options.

Answer 3

In a previous company we got round this problem by changing the names of the debug executable and dlls by appending a "D". So

MainProgram.exe & library.dll

become

MainProgramD.exe & libraryD.dll

This meant that they could co-exist in the same output folder and all scripts, paths etc. could just reference that. The intermediate files still need to go to separate folders as the names of these can't be changed.

Obviously you need to change all your references to point to the modified name for debug - which you will forget to do at some point.

Answer 4

I usually compile in Debug mode, but sometimes need to compile in Release mode. Unfortunately, they don't behave exactly the same in certain error situations. By having separate folders, I don't need to recompile everything just to change modes (and a full recompile of our stuff in Release mode will take a while).