The CLR has been unable to transition from COM context 0xXXXXXX to COM context 0xXXXXXX for 60 seconds. The thread that owns the destination context/apartment is most likely either doing a non pumping wait or processing a very long running operation without pumping Windows messages

Error Message:

“The CLR has been unable to transition from COM context 0x1979d8 to COM context 0x197868 for 60 seconds. The thread that owns the destination context/apartment is most likely either doing a non pumping wait or processing a very long running operation without pumping Windows messages. This situation generally has a negative performance impact and may even lead to the application becoming non responsive or memory usage accumulating continually over time. To avoid this problem, all single threaded apartment (STA) threads should use pumping wait primitives (such as CoWaitForMultipleHandles) and routinely pump messages during long running operations.”

You get this nasty error message and your life is sucked. This happens when you are debugging your application and using breakpoints.

Fix For The Problem:

Go to menu Debug->Exception-> a form appears. Then in Managed Debug Assistants section, just uncheck the ContextSwitchDeadlock.

Note:

If you are not able to see Exception MenuItem in debug menu, then add it from Tools->Customize->Commands.

C# tips & tricks: Do you want to rethrow exception ?

Many times during development we really don’t want to handle exception every where, rather we like to throw it again. But what is the best way to do it:

catch(Exception ex)
{
throw;
}

OR

catch(Exception ex)
{
throw ex;
}

This article I found in net gives really good insight of it. It suggests to use first method, as it would not truncate previous stack trace information.