Question about the Debug or Release mode in CCS studio

Speaking more generically, the build configurations are simply a grouping of compiler and linker options.  By default CCS provides two such groups, "Debug" and "Release".  You can create as many groupings as you wish and call them anything you want.

Within our default options the "Debug" configuration maintains the symbolic debug info whereas "Release" does not.  The "Release" version generally uses the optimizer (-o3) too.

When you do things such as adding preprocessor include paths, etc. you need to do so for both the "Debug" and the "Release" configurations.  Since preprocessor include paths are "just another compiler option" from the perspective of the tools, you need to add it to both configurations.  Potentially these could be different include paths such that you get different header files for "Debug" or "Release", though that would be an uncommon thing to do (at least from what I've done).

In the "Debug" configuration we define a symbol called _DEBUG.  If desired you could do something like this in your code:

#ifdef _DEBUG

    // some piece of code that only gets compiled into the "Debug" version

#endif

I hope that clarifies a little further.

Brad