Most of my development is web apps, so when I was working on a windows app for a customer today, I noticed that there was an extra file or two being generated with the name of the app followed by ".vshost.exe". What was it? Where did it come from? Do I need to redistribute it?

It turns out that this file is automatically generated to help the Visual Studio IDE get the job done in terms of debugging and overall user experience. There's a great post here that provides a lot of information. Another resulution from that article is that you don't need to - and don't want to - distribute the *vshost* files with your application.

(I titled this post "Late to the vshost game" because folks have been writing about this for nearly four years now - but perhaps it can help somebody else out who's never run across or been curious about this little issue before.)