C# - ActiveX control without a form

Question

We are required to use a 3rd party ActiveX control.

The only issue is, the layer in our software is a business layer and has no access to a window or form. It also runs on separate threads (and should work from any thread) that are not STA.

Rather than breaking our separation of UI from business logic, we used this workaround to make it work:

Thread thread = new Thread((ThreadStart)
delegate
{
_myActiveX = new MyActiveXType();
_myActiveX.CreateControl();

//more initialize work

Application.Run();
});
thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA);
thread.IsBackground = true;
thread.Start();

Then anytime we need to reference the control, we call _myActiveX.BeginInvoke() or Invoke().

On disposing of this class (exiting our app), we dispose the control and abort the thread.

My question is, are there any problems with this? Is there a better way to handle this?

Is there a better built in way to work with an ActiveX control from within an unknown multi-threaded environment? We are trying to write our class in a way that wraps the control but will work from any thread.

UPDATE: As an answer suggested, we really would rather use the standard COM object and not use a control at all. Our issue with that was we would get the error "(Exception from HRESULT: 0x8000FFFF (E_UNEXPECTED)" upon the first method or property we call on the COM object. This is a pretty generic error that we don't get when using the ActiveX, any ideas?

UPDATE: Our ocx is "CX25.ocx", using tlbimp.exe we get CX25Lib.dll. Using aximp.exe, we get AxCX25Lib.dll and CX25Lib.dll. CX25Lib.dll does not work in either case. AxCX25Lib.dll works.

Answer 1

If you are calling the ActiveX control from a business layer, that means that it must be able to be used without a UI, e.g. just by calling its public methods. Why not just create an interop RCW for the ActiveX control class and call its methods directly?

Answer 2

I'm assuming this is the proper way to go about this.

We've been using my code above in test environments for the past few weeks with no issues.

If anyone has to use an ActiveX without a form, I assume this is one way to do it.

Just make sure to call _yourActiveXControl.CreateControl() directly after your ActiveX object's constructor. This simplified many issues we had originally.

Answer 3

My solution is to create a hidden winform that host the activex control