Question 134187 in Visual Studio Code Question posted in
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Visual Studio Code – Enable compiler compilation errors in Visual Studio when using #if Debug… #else

Is there a way to enable compilation errors in Visual Studio 2022 for code that is inside the #else clause of a #if Debug...#else conditional? I have a bit of code like so

#if Debug
    // do some stuff
#else
  // do some other stuff, but this code has compilation errors
#endif

My issue is when compiling the code in Visual Studio, it ignores the text inside the #else clause. Thus, if there are compilation errors they are not flagged as errors and compilation is successful, even if the code in the #else clause has errors.

This is routinely causing me to have compilation errors when building on the build server, because these compilations errors are not seen locally. I could remove the conditional and add them before check in, but that is a pain. There has to be a better way.

Google hasn’t been much help. Any suggestion on how to handle this problem?

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2

Answers


  1. 0

    There has to be a better way.

    There is, the Conditional attribute:

    [Conditional("DEBUG")]
void Trace() { /* ... */ }

    Calling the Trace function above will be removed from code if its condition isn’t defined, but it will still be parsed by the compiler for correctness.

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  2. 0

    I would recommend some way to specify configurations explicitly used for debugging. This might be command line parameters, the registry, or just a file that you put somewhere. If you add security sensitive things to this file it might be a good idea to use conditional compilation to ensure all settings have default values unless running in debug. I would at least consider making these settings accessible globally.

    That would turn your conditional compilation into something like

    if(DebugSettings.IsDebug){...}
else {...}

    or

    var credentials = DebugSettings.AzureCredentials ?? Settings.AzureCredentials;

    if this for some reason is not possible you could try something like

    #if DEBUG
    if(???){
        // do stuff
        return; // return to ensure other stuff is not run
    }
#endif
    // do some other stuff

    The trick here is to make ??? something that is true, but the compiler cannot prove is true, otherwise you will get unreachable code errors.

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