What is the purpose of the vshost exe file

Question

When I create and compile a  Hello  World   application in C   I get three files in the Debug folder apart from the main exe  e g  HelloWorld exe    HelloWorld vshost exe HelloWorld pdb HelloWorld vshost exe manifest   What purpose do these files serve

User · Answer

It seems to be a long-running framework process for debugging  to decrease load times    I discovered that when you start your application twice from the debugger often the same vshost exe process will be used  It just unloads all user-loaded DLLs first  This does odd things if you are fooling around with API hooks from managed processes

User · Answer

Adding on  you can turn off the creation of vshost files for your Release build configuration and have it enabled for Debug   Steps   Project Properties   Debug   Configuration  Release    Disable the Visual Studio hosting process Project Properties   Debug   Configuration  Debug    Enable the Visual Studio hosting process     Reference   MSDN How to  Disable the Hosting Process MSDN Hosting Process  vshost exe    Excerpt from MSDN How to  Disable the Hosting Process  Calls to certain APIs can be affected when the hosting process is enabled  In these cases  it is necessary to disable the hosting process to return the correct results   To disable the hosting process   Open an executable project in Visual Studio  Projects that do not produce executables  for example  class library or service projects  do not have this option  On the Project menu  click Properties  Click the Debug tab  Clear the Enable the Visual Studio hosting process check box    When the hosting process is disabled  several debugging features are unavailable or experience decreased performance  For more information  see Debugging and the Hosting Process      In general  when the hosting process is disabled          The time needed to begin debugging  NET Framework applications increases    Design-time expression evaluation is unavailable    Partial trust debugging is unavailable

User · Answer

The vshost exe file is the executable run by Visual Studio  Visual Studio host executable   This is the executable that links to Visual Studio and improves debugging   When you re distributing your application to others  you do not use the vshost exe or  pdb  debug database  files

User · Answer

exe - the  normal  executable  vshost exe - a special version of the executable to aid debuging  see MSDN for details  pdb - the Program Data Base with debug symbols  vshost exe manifest - a kind of configuration file containing mostly dependencies on libraries

User · Answer

I m not sure  but I believe it is a debugging optimization  However  I usually turn it off  see Debug properties for the project  and I don t notice any slowdown and I see no limitations when it comes to debugging

User · Answer

The vshost exe feature was introduced with Visual nbsp Studio nbsp 2005  to answer your comment    The purpose of it is mostly to make debugging launch quicker - basically there s already a process with the framework running  just ready to load your application as soon as you want it to   See this MSDN article and this blog post for more information

[c#] What is the purpose of the vshost.exe file?

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