Development Matters Blog

During a creation and compilation of a Visual Studio project, more files are created in the Debug folder apart from the main output exe file.

They are results of the hosting process feature that was introduced for the first time with VS2005.

Hosting process file, with extension .vshosts.exe, serves main three purposes:

• Improving debugging performance
• Enabling partial trust debugging
• Enabling design time expression evaluation

There are more files created with the vshost file for the Visual Studio project:

• .pdb or the Programm DataBase that contains debug symbols
• .vshost.exe.manifest that contains mostly dependencies on libraries

Also, notice that these files shouldn’t be deployed with the application you finished or run directly.

It’s possible to disable generation vshost files under project settings -> Debug options -> Enable the Visual Studio hosting process checkbox.

You can find more information about the advanced debugging features in a MSDN article.

Writing code documentation has always been a time consuming process. Additionally, reflecting code changes in the already finished documentation proved to be even more time consuming.

Since the beginning of time, code documentation existed only inside the code itself in the form of the in-line comments. However, modern programming languages introduced syntax for the in-line code comments (XML documentation syntax) and brought the capability of generating the external humanly-readable code documentation from these comments.

Visual Studio has a fully integrated support for the XML documentation. In order to use it inside your .NET project you need to enable it on the Build tab of the Properties page of the project.

Once you build the project with the XML documentation option enabled, a list of warnings will be populated with the additional warnings informing you about the missing XML comments.

You can remove these warnings by simply adding the XML comments to each of the publicly visible types from the list. To add XML comment to the publicly visible type, simply type /// on top of it. Visual Studio will automatically generate the required XML comment syntax and all that is left for you to do is to describe it.

XML documentation supports a wide range of the XML tags used for formatting. I will describe these tags in detail in the second part of this post.