current community

your communities

more stack exchange communities

Stack Exchange
tour help
stack overflow careers
Take the 2-minute tour ×
Stack Overflow is a question and answer site for professional and enthusiast programmers. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 2 down vote favorite

I published my application and I want to add extra "Admin" functionality to it. I see a lot of debug information, when I run my application in Debug mode, all of this is removed in the Release mode, for having a more clear application.

Now if I login to my application, I want to check the login name and password, so for example when I login with "Admin", "Password", I want to see the Debug info as well.

Question:

Is it possible to switch from Release to Debug in code?

share|improve this question
    
Yep, but it wouldn't have to be different builds. It would have to be set in codes with a lot of if checks. –  It'sNotALie. Jun 10 '13 at 14:27
    
High odds that you over-estimate the desire of somebody with admin privileges to want to see debugging info. Unless you also plan to send your source code along with the program, the only way to make that extra info useful. In which case you'll probably want a different deployment strategy. –  Hans Passant Jun 10 '13 at 14:38

2 Answers 2

up vote 1 down vote accepted

The short answer is no, because the compiler generates different assemblies for debug and release builds. Some code may be missing, if a developer had added compile-time conditional code, e.g.

#if DEBUG
    DisableSharingWithPrism();
#endif

would only run compile the code in the debug code. In release mode, the code would not be present.

To get round this, write a method to work out if the user is an administrator, and find and replace the #if DEBUG calls with this method, for example:

if (UserIsAdmin())
{
    DisableSharingWithPrism();
}
share|improve this answer
1  
Thanks for the answer, I'm already using the #if DEBUG statements, to hide or show components, I wanted to switch between if the user is logged in as an admin, but I see that this isn't possible, so I will need to do this the other way. –  Max Jun 10 '13 at 14:35
up vote 1 down vote

That depends on how you render that additional information in debug mode. If you enclosed it in "#ifdef DEBUG" the code is not compiled in a release build, so since it is not in the dll, it cannot be executed.

To get debug information into a release build basically you have to replace

#if DEBUG
    OutputSomeDebugInfo();
#endif

with

if (GlobalFlags.IsDebugMode)
{
    OutputSomeDebugInfo();
}

where "GlobalFlags" is a static public class you have to create with a static bool member or property "IsDebugMode" which would be only set to true when you use the admin login or when you do a debug build.

Logging and tracing tools like log4net or from the enterprise library are designed to give you finegrained, configurable control over what is logged in your application, so you may want to check out these too.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.