I was doing some debugging and was amused to get the following error message displayed to me:
“The CLR has been unable to transition from COM context 0x1a0e70 to COM context 0x1a0fe0 for 60 seconds. The thread that owns the destination context/apartment is most likely either doing a non pumping wait or processing a very long running operation without pumping Windows messages. This situation generally has a negative performance impact and may even lead to the application becoming non responsive or memory usage accumulating continually over time. To avoid this problem, all single threaded apartment (STA) threads should use pumping wait primitives (such as CoWaitForMultipleHandles) and routinely pump messages during long running operations.”
Maybe I’m just a big kid, but I always find the unexpected use of the word pumping amusing – and the thought of a non pumping wait did make me laugh! Anyway, the problem actually had nothing to do with not pumping [snigger] Windows messages or some sort of race condition. I had paused at a break point and wandered off to get a cup of tea. Do you think I should report that to Microsoft?! 😉
In a similar vein, have you ever come across the Shell Item ID struct, or SHITEMID as Microsoft call it?
Ha ha, yes I have but I never noticed the alternate connotation! D’Oh!