What is the purpose of the vshost.exe file?

c# visual-studio debugging
Milen picture Milen · Apr 21, 2009 · Viewed 190k times · Source

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)

  1. HelloWorld.vshost.exe
  2. HelloWorld.pdb
  3. HelloWorld.vshost.exe.manifest

What purpose do these files serve?

Answer

Jon Skeet picture Jon Skeet · Apr 21, 2009

The vshost.exe feature was introduced with Visual Studio 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.

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