How to tell which configuration I'm in?

[Vermithrax]

Hi there. This is my first post, and I hope someone can help me with this... Basically, I have a project in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, and I need the program to know what configuration it's in... IE: When you choose DEBUG or RELEASE from the configuration manager, is there a way for the program to know which configuration it's in? I want to have the program change a variable based on which configuration I'm building... IE:

CString vConfig;
if ( configuration == "Debug" )
vConfig == "Debug";
else if ( configuration == "Custom" )
vConfig == "Custom";
else if ( configuration == "Release" )
vConfig == "Release";
else
vConfig == "Something else";

etc...

Of course, I have no idea how to do the configuration == "debug" or whatever thing, and that's what I need to know how to do. Any ideas?

 

[Zyrenthian]

#ifdef _DEBUG
vConfig = "Debug";
#else
vConfig = "Release";
#endif

Matt

 

[Vermithrax]

I have more than just debug and release versions, though... I have release1, release2, etc... With what you show there, I can only tell if it's debug or not, though.

 

[uolj]

Normally you define a symbol in the Preprocessor definitions in the project settings for each configuration. By default, the Win32 Debug configuration usually has _DEBUG defined, and the Win32 Release configuration has NDEBUG defined. If you have multiple configurations you can come up with your own symbols (make sure they are unique) and define a different one in each configuration. For example, you could define MY_RELEASE_CONFIG_1 in your release1 settings, MY_RELEASE_CONFIG_2 in your release2 settings, etc. Then in your code you could use #ifdef preprocessor directives to include code based on those defined symbols.

#ifdef MY_RELEASE_CONFIG_1
// ... code for release1 only.
#endif // MY_RELEASE_CONFIG_1

or

#if !defined(MY_DEBUG_CONFIG_2)
// ... code NOT for debug2 configuration.
#endif // !defined(MY_DEBUG_CONFIG_2)

I'm not too familiar with .NET - I use MSVC++ 6.0 - but I would imagine that it would have the same features. There are lots of ways to utilize these preprocessor definitions so I would recommend looking up #ifdef stuff if you aren't familiar with it. The code above is just examples.

 

[Vermithrax]

Awesome. Thanks so much, uolj. Exactly what I needed to know. I've been programming for about 8 years now, but only recently have I moved over to the Windows platform from Linux (still love Linux, just doin' this for a job!), so I'm still not familiar with the intricacies of it all. Thanks again.