60 Part I Getting Started with Microsoft Visual Basic 2010
Building an Executable File
Your last task in this chapter is to complete the development process and create an
application for Windows, or an executable file. (Had you created a different project type,
of course, such as a Web application, the result of your development efforts would have
been a different type of file—but we’ll discuss this later .) Windows applications created with
Visual Studio have the file name extension .exe and can be run on any system that contains
Windows and the necessary support files. (Visual Basic installs these support files—including
the .NET Framework files—automatically .) If you plan to distribute your applications, see the
section entitled “Deploying Your Application” later in the chapter.
At this point, you need to know that Visual Studio can create two types of executable files
for your Windows application project: a debug build and a release build.
Debug builds are created automatically by Visual Studio when you create and test
your program. They are stored in a folder called Bin\Debug within your project folder.
The debug executable file contains debugging information that makes the program run
slightly slower.
Release builds are optimized executable files stored in the Bin\Release folder within your
project. To customize the settings for your release build, you click the [ProjectName]
Properties command on the Project menu, and then click the Compile tab, where you see
a list of compilation options that looks like this: