hi friends

As the functionality of the Debug and Trace classes is much the same, the difference lies in when they are used rather than what they do.

Basically, 'Debug' only looks for problems when a program is in debug mode and 'Trace' continues to monitor a program's health after deployment (i.e. in release mode).

Including debug code will not increase the size of the deployed program because the compiler will simply ignore it. However, including trace code will increase the size of the deployed program and you therefore need to weigh this extra size and possible performance penalty against the benefits of having trace functionality. If the extra costs are not acceptable, then disable trace and just use debug.

In VS 2005, the DEBUG compiler directive is enabled by default in debug mode and the TRACE compiler directive is enabled by default in both debug and release modes.

2 Replies

Know the answer? Post it — somebody with the same question will find it here.

19y ago

I'm not sure of the exact differences but I do know what an debug statements are not included in the "Release" build so they can be put in and left in without them affecting the "Release". Trace statements are included in both "Debug" and "Release" builds but u can refer wt exactly is going here

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa984620(VS.71).aspx

Alan19y ago
As the functionality of the Debug and Trace classes is much the same, the difference lies in when they are used rather than what they do.

Basically, 'Debug' only looks for problems when a program is in debug mode and 'Trace' continues to monitor a program's health after deployment (i.e. in release mode).

Including debug code will not increase the size of the deployed program because the compiler will simply ignore it. However, including trace code will increase the size of the deployed program and you therefore need to weigh this extra size and possible performance penalty against the benefits of having trace functionality. If the extra costs are not acceptable, then disable trace and just use debug.

In VS 2005, the DEBUG compiler directive is enabled by default in debug mode and the TRACE compiler directive is enabled by default in both debug and release modes.