Marginal Utility - IsDebug for .Net 2.0

Unfortunately for my co-workers (and especially the QA department), I play build engineer because we don't have a dedicated build engineer or even build server. Small company, that's how it goes.

In recent months, I've stepped my game up. Batch files, playboy. I know how retarded that sounds - I was this close to having Cruise Control up and running, but I got fed up with the memory footprint it left on my labtop. It's not that trivial a matter when I can time out database calls by having a debugger up and running the same time as I have SQL Server Management Studio with a couple of windows open. Any way you slice it, that shit is s-a-d.

But in the past, I wasn't quite as lazy as I am now. Rather than spend a couple of hours cobbling together a full build script (dear me from 3 years ago - is it really so hard to Google csc.exe?), I did it all by hand from inside of Visual Studio. Clean out the destination directory, swap from Debug mode to Release mode, compile, zip up, yadda yadda.

But wouldn't you know it? It's so simple and yet I managed to screw it up. Multiple times. Handed QA releases that were compiled in debug mode or that had assemblies left over from debug mode and they got clued into it (because our app works slightly differently in the two modes (BY DESIGN!!!)). How was I to know? DLLs look like DLLs, people.

Eventually, I found a marvelous little utility called IsDebug out on the wild internets. Look at that! You drag them DLLs onto it and it tells you whether they're debug mode or release mode! Total win!

When I finally sat down and knocked out our app's upgrade to .Net 2.0, I was kind of bummed to find out that IsDebug didn't work anymore. I recompiled, nothing. Checked file properties, still not working.

But wait! Internets to the rescue again with the clue-by-four on what new properties I should be examining!

So I got Jeff's peanut butter in Jim's chocolate and here we are - IsDebug for .Net 2.0.

I've got a compiled version if you're lazy or don't have a compiler (I imagine this utility is especially marginal if you don't) and if you distrust stuff I write because I'm on the internet or because you know that I cut and pasted it together, there's the solution with source code for you too.

HOORAY!