To disable assertions or set some other VM property for your application, there are two places to pay attention to. First, $APP_HOME/etc/*.conf in your distribution should set things for users of your application - do this for things that should be set for any user.

You also will probably want to test these settings - and *.conf is not going to be used when you launch your application by running your project from Ant (nor the NetBeans IDE). So to handle this, you can set any of the properties documented in $NB_HOME/harness/README. For example, to disable assertions when testing your application from the IDE, edit your module suite’s nbproject/project.properties to include run.args.extra=-J-da or similar.

See $NB_HOME/harness/README in your copy of NetBeans for the full list of properties that affect how NetBeans-based-applications are run when developing them in the IDE.

Applies to: NetBeans 6.5 and above