Question

We have a very tricky interop problem wherein the thread used to initialize a 3rd-party system has to be the same thread used to terminate it. Failure to do this results in a deadlock. We are performing interop from a WCF service hosted in IIS. Currently this cleanup is done in disposal and normally works very well. Unfortunately, under heavy load IIS will do a rude unload and we never get to call dispose. We can move the shutdown logic into a critical finalizer but that doesn’t help since we no longer have access to the initializing thread! At this point our only recourse seems to be notifying the CLR that the AppDomain is now likely in a corrupted state. However, I’m not sure how to do that (or if it’s even possible). It may be that this is the utility of contracts at a class level but I admit I don’t really understand those fully.

EDIT: Alternatively, this is could be viewed as a thread affinity problem in the finalizer. If anyone has a clever solution to that, I’m all ears 🙂

Answer 1

Try to split the code that depends on that native dependency to a standalone Windows service application if possible. If it cannot work well with WCF/IIS, you should avoid the conflicts instead of fighting against it.