I’m working on a little application right now that provides some insight into the assemblies in use for a given application. One of the things that I want to be able to show is whether or not each assembly was built in Debug or Release mode. As you’re no doubt aware,running applications in production that were built in Debug mode can be a major performance problem(at a minimum – depending on what else you have turned on in Debug mode it could also be a security issue).

So I did some searching and quickly found some sample code that I was able to use in some test code to confirm that it is working. Fellow MVP Bill McCarthy wrote (like, 5 years ago to the day!) about how to do this in Visual Basic. Not that I have anything against VB, but my preference since VB6 has been C# (if nothing else, it makes JavaScript much easier to grok), so I had to translate the code into C#, which provides me with something to share with you. This is literally Bill’s code, translated by me into C#. Any bugs you can probably assign to me as the translator, rather than Bill as original author.

Check If An Assembly Was Compiled In Debug Mode

private bool IsAssemblyDebugBuild(string filepath)
{
    return IsAssemblyDebugBuild(Assembly.LoadFile(Path.GetFullPath(filepath)));
}
     
private bool IsAssemblyDebugBuild(Assembly assembly)
{
    foreach (var attribute in assembly.GetCustomAttributes(false))
    {
        var debuggableAttribute = attribute as DebuggableAttribute;
        if(debuggableAttribute != null)
        {
            return debuggableAttribute.IsJITTrackingEnabled;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

Later, this kind of detection was added to Glimpse, so you can use that tool to identify if you’ve deployed Debug-built assemblies to your server for your ASP.NET apps.

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