Brows.Win32.STAThreadPool 1.0.0

brows-win32-stathreadpool

STA thread pool for .NET on Win32.

Some Windows APIs — shell namespace extensions, many COM servers, drag-and-drop, and the clipboard among them — must be called from a thread in a single-threaded apartment that pumps messages. The .NET thread pool is MTA, so this library provides a small pool of reusable STA worker threads and an async-friendly way to run work on them.

Installation

dotnet add package Brows.Win32.STAThreadPool

Target frameworks: net462, net48, net8.0-windows, net10.0-windows. On .NET 8 and later the consuming project must target a Windows TFM, such as net10.0-windows; the Windows Desktop framework reference the STA message loop needs flows in from this package.

Usage

Create one pool and keep it for the lifetime of the component that needs STA access. Creating a pool does not start any threads; workers are created on demand.

using Brows.Threading;

var pool = new STAThreadPool("shell");

// Synchronous work.
var name = await pool.Work("get-name", () => {
    return shellItem.GetDisplayName();
}, cancellationToken);

// Asynchronous work. Continuations after each await resume on the same STA thread.
var items = await pool.Work("enumerate", async token => {
    var folder = await OpenFolderAsync(token);
    return folder.Enumerate().ToList();
}, cancellationToken);

// Overloads without a result are also available.
await pool.Work("refresh", () => view.Refresh(), cancellationToken);

Every Work call is dispatched to an idle worker, or to a newly created one if the pool has not yet reached WorkerCountMax. When all workers are busy, the call waits and retries until one frees up, so a Work task may not begin immediately. The CancellationToken is honored before the work is dispatched and is passed through to the asynchronous overloads; it does not interrupt a callback that has already started.

Exceptions thrown by the callback are propagated to the awaiting caller, and cancellation surfaces as an OperationCanceledException.

Configuration

var pool = new STAThreadPool("shell") {
    WorkerCountMax = 4,
    WorkerCountMin = 1,
    IdleTime = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(1),
};

Values outside the documented ranges throw ArgumentOutOfRangeException and leave the property unchanged. When WorkerCountMin and WorkerCountMax are both being raised, set WorkerCountMax first; when both are being lowered, set WorkerCountMin first.

Shutting down

pool.Empty();

Empty removes every worker from the pool and asks its STA message loop to exit. A worker that is running work at the time finishes that work first. The pool remains usable afterward and will create new workers on the next Work call.

Workers are also retired automatically: a periodic sweep removes workers that have been idle longer than IdleTime, never dropping the pool below WorkerCountMin. Worker threads are background threads, so they never keep the process alive.

Thread safety

STAThreadPool is safe to use from multiple threads at once. Each worker runs one work item at a time, so work dispatched to the same worker is serialized, but separate work items may run concurrently on different workers.

Building

dotnet build
dotnet test

License

MIT