I ran in to an even bigger problem along the same lines - changes to any file or sub-folder in the AppDomain base directory cause the hosting environment to shutdown. This is a pretty big issue for our application as we're running a WPF UI in the same AppDomain and we can't restart it without being distruptive to the user.
I really wanted to avoid having to run a separate AppDomain for the web based part of the application so I did some digging with Reflector. I found that the culprit was the internal class FileChangesMonitor.
So I wrote a horrible horrible reflection hack to solve the problem. I thought I'd post it here as a potential solution for anyone else having the same problem. You just need to call HttpInternals.StopFileMonitoring() to disable shutdown on file/folder changes.
internal static class HttpInternals
{
private static readonly FieldInfo s_TheRuntime = typeof(HttpRuntime).GetField("_theRuntime", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Static);
private static readonly FieldInfo s_FileChangesMonitor = typeof(HttpRuntime).GetField("_fcm", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance);
private static readonly MethodInfo s_FileChangesMonitorStop = s_FileChangesMonitor.FieldType.GetMethod("Stop", BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance);
private static object HttpRuntime
{
get
{
return s_TheRuntime.GetValue(null);
}
}
private static object FileChangesMonitor
{
get
{
return s_FileChangesMonitor.GetValue(HttpRuntime);
}
}
public static void StopFileMonitoring()
{
s_FileChangesMonitorStop.Invoke(FileChangesMonitor, null);
}
}