Single-threaded apartment - cannot instantiate ActiveX control
I need to get information about applied CSS styles in HTML page. I used AxWebBrowser and iterate IHTMLDOMNode. I'm able to get all the data I need and move the code into my application. The problem is that this part is running inside of the background worker and I got exception when trying to instantiate the control.
AxWebBrowser browser = new AxWebBrowser();
ActiveX control '8856f961-340a-11d0-a96b-00c04fd705a2' cannot be instantiated
because the current thread is not in a single-threaded apartment.
Is there any way how to solve this or other option than AxWebBrowser?
The problem you're running into is that most background thread / worker APIs will create the thread in a Multithreaded Apartment state. The error message indicates that the control requires the thread be a Single Threaded Apartment.
You can work around this by creating a thread yourself and specifying the STA apartment state on the thread.
var t = new Thread(MyThreadStartMethod);
t.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
t.Start();
Go ahead and add [STAThread] to the main entry of your application, this indicates the COM threading model is single-threaded apartment (STA)
example:
static class Program
{
/// <summary>
/// The main entry point for the application.
/// </summary>
[STAThread]
static void Main()
{
Application.EnableVisualStyles();
Application.SetCompatibleTextRenderingDefault(false);
Application.Run(new WebBrowser());
}
}