How to avoid publishing ASP.NET applications in debug mode from Visual Studio?

Question

We all know that we should only be publishing our ASP.NET Web Applications with release build type, so why do I not get a warning when I trigger the "Publish" command in Visual Studio 2008, for a project configured to build in debug mode?

Sure, there might be cases where I need to publish a debug build to a development or test environment, but answering yes in a confirmation dialog would be acceptable in these cases. Is there an option that I have overlooked, forcing Visual Studio to warn me every time I try to publish a debug build?

Yes, we could just ban using the "Publish" command and use a more solid build management tool, but this involves a change of process and might not be an option in this particular case.

Answer 1

I use Publish to build and publish my development sites to the dev servers all the time, a question about this would just be irritating in my opinion.

I think the issue here is one of your personal process rather than the tool. Production releases should be far less frequent and would require you to change the location the site is being published to, if you remember to change that then it's not too much to also expect that you are publishing the correct build type.

Answer 2

Typically things like this are handled in an automated build tool. Quite frankly, I publish to a dev site by orders of magnitude more often than I do to production.

For that reason alone having an extra dialog box in the process would be a bit maddening.

Further, even without a build system in place, most people have different config files for the different environments and for the most part handle it with a web.config setting.

Answer 3

You can set deployment retail="true" in your production server machine.config to stop worrying about it

<configuration>
    <system.web>
          <deployment retail="true"/>
    </system.web>
</configuration>

Tip from Scott Guthrie's article Don’t run production ASP.NET Applications with debug=”true” enabled