About Building a Project Configuration
Home Page (Projects) | Overviews | How Do I... Topics | NMAKE Reference
You can build or rebuild the program or library that a project configuration defines. When you build a project configuration, Visual C++ processes only the files in the project that have changed since the last build. When you rebuild a project configuration, Visual C++ processes all the files in the project. You can either choose to build a single project configuration or the default project configuration, or you can choose multiple configurations to build in one operation.
When you create a project, Visual C++ sets default options for both Debug and Release configurations. The Debug configuration contains full symbolic debugging information that can be used by the integrated debugger in Visual C++ or by other debuggers that use the Microsoft debug format. Visual C++ also turns off optimizations in the Debug configuration because they generally make debugging more difficult. The Release configuration does not contain any symbolic debugging information, and it uses any optimizations that you have set after creating the projects. Depending on your installation and the choices you made when you created your project, you may have other default project configurations with other options, or you may have specifically created other project configurations with other options. Each project configuration also specifies the directories in which the intermediate and final files are created.