How to undefine the symbol CONTRACTS_FULL?

Question

Visual Studio defines the CONTRACTS_FULL symbol automatically if you enable contract checking in the Code Contracts tab of the Project Properties page.

- C# 5.0 In a Nutshell (page 518)

I'd like to disable/undefine the symbol but it doesn't appear in the Conditional compilation symbols field of the Build tab in the project settings.

(I'm not interested in disabling code-contracts completely! by that I simply mean that setting the contract checking to None is not a solution).

If it matters, the reason I want to do this is because in my release builds I only want to throw on Contract.Requires<TException>, and I don't want to throw ContractException at all.

One "solution" I found is to put #undef CONTRACTS_FULL at the first line of each file, it fixed it but actually doing that would be horrible.

(BTW up until now VS didn't define CONTRACTS_FULL and I had to define it myself, but I guess some setting changed accidentally)

Answer 1

You cannot run the contract tools and undefine the CONTRACTS_FULL symbol. The tools depend on that being defined. Nothing will work if you try to force this. That is why we define the symbol automatically inside the msbuild scripts.

Users of the Code Contract tools should never manually try to define or undefine the CONTRACTS_FULL symbol as it is a tool controlled variable.

Answer 2

I've read that book, and there WAS a contract level that only used Contract.Requires. It was the option before none in there, but it's somewhere in that section in the book, definitely. However, I can't help you with globally undefing CONTRACTS_FULL. Sorry. I think though that in that contract checking level it's automatically undef'd.

EDIT: Yeah, you need to put it at level one (ReleaseRequired).