I tried this and I get an error telling me the control can’t be created because the thread isn’t STA. Any idea how to get the creation thread STA using a separate process?

Is it to possible to unload the AppDomain where Add-in was created? When I tried to uload the add-in’s AppDomain, it closes the main application silently. Please find below the code I tried and advise me if something is wrong here.

private void somethingToolStripMenuItem_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
MessageBox.Show(”Something”);

Control ctrl = tabControl1.TabPages[0].Controls[0];
tabControl1.TabPages.RemoveAt(0);
AppDomain domain = AddInController.GetAddInController(ctrl).AppDomain;
ctrl = null;
GC.Collect();
AppDomain.Unload(domain);
}

Thanks in advance.

About the control and alt keys, they do act strange on a modified version of your sample.

I modded the sample to create a MDI parent form, each of the HostedControls get inserted on a new form instance, everything seems fine until you press the control key or Tab+, the expected behavior would be to change the focus on each of the controls inside the form, but, the behavior i get is swapping between the different hosted forms in the mdi, maybe i’m doing something wrong, but i just wanted to know your comment to see if you get the same behavior.

thanks for your comments

When you activate an add-in, it is going to create a new one, that’s just how CLR add-in’s work. So you need to hold on to the activated instance if you want to reuse the underlying control. So you might go through a caching class of some kind that looks up the add by token name and either returns the already activated add-in if it exists, or activates (creates) it if it doesn’t and adds it to the cache.

The issue with ctrl+ and alt+ keys should work fine with the WPF/Windows interop. It was my first attempt without the interop that had these deficiencies.

i’m using spring, and i’ve configured the user controls in my config file, but everytime an addin gets activated, it creates a new instance of the Control without actually querying spring for the configured instance, ( i’ve modified the Control GetControl() method to get the actual spring instance ) but i still have two instances of the same control….

another question is, why is the behavior of special keys like tab and ctrl+ and alt+ keys changed?? is there anyway to fix this issue??

thanks!

I haven’t tried it with different security settings yet. My understanding is that the handle to the add-in control is a fairly low-level Win32 handle, so it’s mostly rendering and eventing, the add-in control code is still running on it’s own side.

Why would you need to marshall the form to the host side? Why not just run it on the add-in side?

Or are you thinking of an MDI scenario? In that case I would have a host form on the host side and just fill it with a control from the add-in side…