What is the best way and recommended practices for interacting with Lotus Notes from C#

Question

In particular, I have to extract all the messages and attachments from Lotus Notes files in the fastest and most reliable way. Another point that may be relevant is that I need to do this from a secondary thread.

Edit

Thanks for the answers - both of which are good. I should provide more background information.

We currently have a WinForms application with a background thread using the Notes COM API.

However it seems to be unstable. (Of course it may be we are doing something wrong.) For example, we have found we have to preinitialize the Notes session on the main thread or else the call to session.CreateDXLExporter() on the background thread throws an exception.

Answer 1

I really do hate that NotesSession COM object.

You cannot use it in another thread than the thread it was initialized. Threads in .NET are fibers, the real underlying thread may change at any time.

So I suggest using it this way, in a using block :

Imports Domino
Imports System.Threading

Public Class AffinitedSession
    Implements IDisposable

    Private _session As NotesSession
    Public Sub New(ByVal pass As String)
        Thread.BeginThreadAffinity()
        _session = New NotesSession()
        _session.Initialize(pass)
    End Sub

    Public ReadOnly Property NotesSession() As NotesSession
        Get
            Return _session
        End Get
    End Property

    Private disposedValue As Boolean = False        ' To detect redundant calls

    ' IDisposable
    Protected Overridable Sub Dispose(ByVal disposing As Boolean)
        If Not Me.disposedValue Then
            If disposing Then
                ' TODO: free other state (managed objects).
            End If

            ' TODO: free your own state (unmanaged objects).
            ' TODO: set large fields to null.
            _session = Nothing
            Thread.EndThreadAffinity()
        End If
        Me.disposedValue = True
    End Sub

#Region " IDisposable Support "
    ' This code added by Visual Basic to correctly implement the disposable pattern.
    Public Sub Dispose() Implements IDisposable.Dispose
        ' Do not change this code.  Put cleanup code in Dispose(ByVal disposing As Boolean) above.
        Dispose(True)
        GC.SuppressFinalize(Me)
    End Sub
#End Region

End Class

Notice the Thread.BeginThreadAffinity() and the Thread.EndThreadAffinity()

Those are your friends.

Cheers !