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Asked: 2026-05-11T02:32:26+00:00

When writing plugins for media center your plugin is hosted in ehexthost.exe this exe

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When writing plugins for media center your plugin is hosted in ehexthost.exe this exe gets launched from ehshell.exe and you have no way of launching it directly, instead you pass a special param to ehshell.exe which will launch the plugin in a separate process.

When we are debugging media browser I find the process of attaching to a second process kind of clunky, I know about Debugger.Attach and also of some special registry entries I can use.

Both these methods don’t exactly fit my bill. What I want is to press F5 and have my current instance of visual studio attach to the child process automatically. Can this be done?

If there is a plugin for VS that allows me to achieve this functionality I would be happy with it.

EDIT

I ended up going with the following macro: 

Public Sub CompileRunAndAttachToEhExtHost()      DTE.Solution.SolutionBuild.Build(True)     DTE.Solution.SolutionBuild.Debug()      Dim trd As System.Threading.Thread = New System.Threading.Thread(AddressOf AttachToEhExtHost)     trd.Start()  End Sub  Public Sub AttachToEhExtHost()     Dim i As Integer = 0     Do Until i = 50         i = i + 1         Try              For Each proc As EnvDTE.Process In DTE.Debugger.LocalProcesses                 If (proc.Name.IndexOf('ehexthost.exe') <> -1) Then                     proc.Attach()                     Exit Sub                 End If             Next         Catch e As Exception             ' dont care - stuff may be busy          End Try         Threading.Thread.Sleep(100)     Loop End Sub

Also, I outlined the process on how to get this going on my blog.

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1 Answer

  1. I would use a macro. I’ve redefined my F5 function to attach to the asp.net process instead of the long build/validate it usually performs. This works pretty well for me and it’s really easy.

        For Each process In DTE.Debugger.LocalProcesses         If (process.Name.IndexOf('aspnet_wp.exe') <> -1) Then             process.Attach()             Exit Sub         End If     Next
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