Q:

Is there any reason to prefer running an application from within IDE vs running stand alone executable?

I work with C++ integer programming routines in terms of developing faster specialized methods for difficult NP-Hard problems. I came across an earlier question that dealt more with getting different results when an application is launched from within an IDE (Visual Studio) versus running the built application from the command line without opening the IDE at all.
Differences between running an executable with Visual Studio debugger vs without debugger
This question is not about different results, but more about whether each option (running from within IDE vs running executable standalone) has any impact on computational time and performance. In my line of work, it is important to show that any specialized algorithm that we develop does much better in terms of computational time as compared to solving the integer program directly using a generic off the shelf solver such as CPLEX. Testing both these options (our specialized algorithm vs CPLEX directly) requires generating a linear/integer programming model from using CPLEX routines and libraries embedded within a C++ file.
Then, each setting is built from within Visual Studio (F7) and run (F5). Note that F7 itself generates the executable file.
To give each method (our specialized algorithm or CPLEX directly) the best chance to run with as fast computational time as possible, is it suggested to launch the application by pressing F5 within the IDE (Visual Studio, in this case), or it is better to run the application (generated by build F7) as an .exe without even opening the IDE? Assume that the working directory and intermediate files that are needed are accessed from the same folder for both options (IDE vs standalone .exe).
In other words, does IDE launch differ in any significant way from running the  .exe directly so as to have an impact on computational times of the application?

A:

In Visual Studio, your program is run as a standalone process. Before starting you can choose Debug or Release version to run. The Release version has optimizations enabled.
When running within the IDE, VS is monitoring your application, so there might be some kind of overhead. You need to measure on your specific machine to find out how much.
With ctrl-f5 you can run your application outside the IDE. 

