Embedded WinForm Control in IE crashes...

[Marco]

Hello,

I have a WinForm control embedded in IE that crashes everytime I close
my browser. If i click on a link in IE when the control is loaded and
brings me to another page, IE also crashes. I don't get any debug
errors from IE itself (via IEDebug). Does anyone have any idea why
this would happen? As a standalone App, my control works fine. Is IE
treating my control any differently?


Thank you in advance,
Marco

 

[Frank Hileman]

Hello Marco,

IE does treat Windows Forms Controls differently. It can fire paint events
on a background thread. To debug your control first load it in IE, then
attach to the process via an instance of Visual Studio .NET. Doing this we
noticed IE used additional threads that are not used in a normal windows
forms application. Because of this, we added additional locking code to
internal VG.net data structures used during paint and animation.

Now any control created using VG.net, running in IE, is crash-proof. You
will have to add similar locking to your data structures. We used the
Monitor class and a single lock object for all paint and animation updates.
Animation updates in VG.net are triggered by a windows forms Timer.

As far as I know, this problem was never discussed anywhere by MS.

Regards,
Frank Hileman

check out VG.net: http://www.vgdotnet.com
Animated vector graphics system
Integrated Visual Studio .NET graphics editor