What's the difference between compilation debug="false" and Release mode?

Question

In ASP.NET, what's the difference between building a project with in the Web.config and with Release mode in the Configuration Manager?

When would you use one and not the other?

Answer 1

Depending on how you set up your web app (Web Site model vs Web Application model), you might be deploying un-compiled source code directly to the web server. In that case, the ASP.Net runtime needs to know how you want your code compiled when requests start coming in.

Answer 2

ScottGu did a pretty good right up of the differences here on his blog.

I typically use this mode when I need to do debugging inside of Visual Studio or if I'm trying to track down a particularly nasty bug. So I usually run with debug mode to set to false.

Answer 3

Here's the best explanation that I found:

http://odetocode.com/blogs/scott/archive/2005/11/15/debug-and-release-builds-in-asp-net-2-0.aspx