Friday, August 11, 2006 2:59 AM
If you are developing with Visual Studio 2005 you probably have seen the *.vshost.exe files inside of your bin folder or you saw the process running while debugging. The vshost.exe file is coming from Visual Studio and serves a very good purpose. The vshost.exe is a new Visual Studio 2005 feature and is actually a hosting process.
It serves mainly three purposes:
- Improve Performance
The hosting process improves performance by handling creation of the AppDomain and initalization of the debugger. - Allow partial trust debugging
Simulating a partial trust environment within Visual Studio requires special setup of the AppDomain. Vhost.exe takes care of this. - Allow design time expression evaluation.
Supports the Immediate Window.
The *.vshost.exe files are exclusively used by the VS 2005 IDE, they serve no other purpose.
If you want to disable the generation of the vshost files you can do so under your projects settings.
In general, when the hosting process is disabled the time needed to begin debugging increases.