The hosting process creates an application domain and associates the debugger with the application. Performing these tasks can introduce a noticeable delay between the time debugging is started and the time the application begins running. The hosting process helps increase performance by creating the application domain and associating the debugger in the background, and saving the application domain and debugger state between runs of the application. For more information on application domains, see Application Domains.
An application can be specified as a partial trust application in the Security page of the Project Designer. Debugging a partial trust application requires special initialization of the application domain. This initialization is handled by the hosting process.
Design-time expression evaluation enables you to test code from the Immediate window without having to run the application. The hosting process executes this code during design time expression evaluation. For more information, see Immediate Window.