I found this very useful today which can help you save your image into icon. It's free. All you need to do is downloading the file then put it in your "\Plug-ins\File Formats" folder. 

Here is the link to download this file.

Hope you like it as well.

Microsoft TechEd  2009 New Zealand has been finished today. To be honest, this year's event is quite disappointing. I can only give it 6 out of 10. One of the most common words I heard is "Sorry, I cannot talk about this right now". There are not a lot of new stuffs from a developer's point of view. In my last session "OFC301 - Deep dive into SharePoint features and solutions", it looks like the speaker was doing SharePoint Development 101. Come on!  :( Maybe Microsoft should follow Gen-I's example, found some nice looking girls to make juice for everyone. That would be more fun than sitting there and listening to something really basic.  But among all sessions I attended, I found those sessions presented by Michael Howard are really good. He really inspired on how I should write secure code as a developer. Apart from that, I also quite excited about the Windows Identity Foundation. But that about all, hopefully there will be a more exciting TechEd next year.

Here are some common questions about the vshost file:

What is vshost.exe file and what is that for?

Vshost file is the hosting process file. Microsoft introduced this from Visual Studio 2005. It has three main purposes.
1. Improve the performance for debugging. 
Managed code need to run inside application domains which provide isolation, unloading, and security boundaries for executing managed code. But it takes some time to create an AppDomain and initialize the debugger along with it. When your application end, the AppDomain and debug state will get lost. When you debug your code, you need to do it over and over again. It becomes not ideal at all. So the job of the hosting process is to improve performance by handling creation of the AppDomain and the initialization of the debugger at the background before you start debugging and keep the state around between runs of your application.
2. Allow partial trust debugging.
From Visual Studio 2005, you have the ability to debug applications in partial trust with permission settings as defined on the new Security page. When you deploy a partial trust application, it runs in a limited security context automatically. However, simulating a partial trust environment within Visual Studio under the debugger requires special initialization of the AppDomain, which is handled by the hosting process.
3.Allow design time expression evaluation.
The hosting process gives you the ability to test code in your application from the immediate window, without actually having to run your application. The hosting process is also used to execute your code under design time expression evaluation.

Why it is in the "Bin" folder?

When your application is run within the hosting process "vshost" is the top level executing assembly in the AppDomain, not your application. Therefore assemblies, config files, and manifest files cannot be properly loaded in all scenarios unless the "vshost" files are in the same folder with all of the other files.

Can I remove the "vshost" file from the release build?

Yes, you can. The *.vshost.exe file are only needed by visual studio IDE. They do not have any other usage.

How to stop generating "vshost" files?

Today when I was crawling my SharePoint， the crawler report there was an error during the crawling. But it didn't tell me what was wrong. It is really annoying. You can check your errors using the crawl log inside search admin. But as a "Geek" do we have something much more fun? After some research, I found this useful query. 

select msscrawlurllog.lasttouchstart as Time, msscrawlurllog.displayurl as CrawlURL, msscrawlurllog.errorid as ErrorCode, msscrawlerrorlist.errormsg as ErrorDescription from msscrawlurllog inner join msscrawlerrorlist on msscrawlurllog.errorid = msscrawlerrorlist.errorid order by msscrawlurllog.lasttouchstart

Run this query against your SharedService Search Database. We can see all errors happen during the crawling as a real IT geek :D.