Remove Debug Code For Release Build

From: http://mobiledevelopertips.com/debugging/remove-debug-code-for-release-build.html

When it’s time to remove debug code and log messasges from your application, it’s straight forward if you follow a few simple steps during development.

First, wrap debugging code in a block similar to the following:

#ifdef DEBUG
  // Debug code here...  
#endif

From the Edit Scheme dialog select the Run tab. In the Info tab, set the Build Configuration to Debug. By the way, when you create a new project, Debug is the default value, so you can skip this step if you have not previously changed the value.

When you are ready to have the debug code removed from your build, return to the Edit Scheme menu and set the Build Configuration to Release. When you rebuild the project, the code inside the #ifdef DEBUG – #endif will no longer be included in the app.

You can see the preprocessing macro definitions that make this possible by opening the Build Settings and searching for debug. You will find the DEBUG macro defined as follows:

Removing Console / NSLog Messages

In a previous post, Debugging Macros, I wrote an alternative for NSLog. Along with this, I included code to turn those same messages off. However, there is now a much cleaner way to do this using the DEBUG preprocessor macro shown above:

#ifdef DEBUG
  #define debug(format, ...) CFShow([NSString stringWithFormat:format, ## __VA_ARGS__]);
#else
  #define debug(format, ...) 
#endif

You can now write debugging messages to the console as follows, which will be removed when creating a release build:

debug(@"Your debug message here...");