这篇文章很清楚地解释了STA和MTA。

了解COM公寓，第一部分 理解COM公寓，第二部分

关于什么是Apartment的要点:

An apartment is a concurrency boundary; it’s an imaginary box drawn around objects and client threads that separates COM clients and COM objects that have incompatible threading characteristics. Every thread that uses COM, and every object that those threads create, is assigned to an apartment. When a thread calls COM’s CoInitialize or CoInitializeEx function, that thread is placed in an apartment. And when an object is created, it too is placed in an apartment. Whenever it creates a new apartment, COM allocates an apartment object on the heap and initializes it with important information such as the apartment ID and apartment type. When it assigns a thread to an apartment, COM records the address of the corresponding apartment object in thread-local storage (TLS).

Side note: If you are using some PowerShell 2.0 snap-ins, you need to launch PowerShell version 3 or greater with -MTA option to use them. PowerShell 2 apartment model is MTA versus later versions use STA as default. Other point is bitness. Normal calls in apartment are not marshalled (direct calls), so if your caller is x64 then callee must be also x64. Only way around this is to use remote procedure call (RPC), which add huge amount of overhead (spawn a new 32-bit process to load snap-in DLL and query result by some means).For developer: always publish type library - it make your COM object discovery and usage much easier! Every interface should be public and unique - implementation can be proprietary or open source.

另一种情况

例子:

 IStorage_vtbl** reference; // you got it by some means of factory
 
 
 public unsafe int OpenStorage(char* pwcsName, IStorage pstgPriority, uint grfMode, char** snbExclude, uint reserved, IStorage* ppstg)
 {
     IStorage_vtbl** @this = (IStorage_vtbl**)reference;
     IStorage_vtbl* vtbl = *@this;
     if (vtbl == null)
         throw new InvalidComObjectException();
     Delegate genericDelegate = Marshal.GetDelegateForFunctionPointer(vtbl->method_6, typeof(delegate_6));
     delegate_6 method = (delegate_6)genericDelegate;
     return method(@this, pwcsName, pstgPriority, grfMode, snbExclude, reserved, ppstg);
 }
 

这段代码只是为COM子系统的实际调用添加了“This”指针 那么，这个调用是打开IStorage STA或MTA的实例吗?

调用COM对象dll的代码(例如，读取私有数据文件)可能在用户界面中正常工作，但却神秘地挂在服务上。原因是。net 2.0的用户界面假设是STA(线程安全的)，而服务假设是MTA((在此之前，服务假设是STA)。必须为服务中的每个COM调用创建一个STA线程会增加大量开销。

STA(单线程公寓)的基本概念是，一次只有一个线程与您的代码交互。打到你公寓的电话是通过窗口消息(使用一个不可见的)窗口编组的。这允许调用排队等待操作完成。

MTA(多线程公寓)是许多线程可以同时操作的地方，作为开发人员的您有责任处理线程安全性。

关于COM中的线程模型还有很多需要学习的地方，但是如果你在理解它们是什么方面有困难，那么我会说理解STA是什么以及它是如何工作的将是最好的起点，因为大多数COM对象都是STA的。

公寓线程，如果一个线程和它正在使用的对象住在同一个公寓，那么它就是公寓线程。我认为这只是一个COM概念，因为它只是谈论与它们交互的对象和线程的一种方式……

这篇文章很清楚地解释了STA和MTA。

了解COM公寓，第一部分 理解COM公寓，第二部分

关于什么是Apartment的要点:

An apartment is a concurrency boundary; it’s an imaginary box drawn around objects and client threads that separates COM clients and COM objects that have incompatible threading characteristics. Every thread that uses COM, and every object that those threads create, is assigned to an apartment. When a thread calls COM’s CoInitialize or CoInitializeEx function, that thread is placed in an apartment. And when an object is created, it too is placed in an apartment. Whenever it creates a new apartment, COM allocates an apartment object on the heap and initializes it with important information such as the apartment ID and apartment type. When it assigns a thread to an apartment, COM records the address of the corresponding apartment object in thread-local storage (TLS).

根据我的理解，“Apartment”是用来保护COM对象不受多线程问题的影响。

If a COM object is not thread-safe, it should declare it as a STA object. Then only the thread who creates it can access it. The creation thread should declare itself as a STA thread. Under the hood, the thread stores the STA information in its TLS(Thread Local Storage). We call this behavior as that the thread enters a STA apartment. When other threads want to access this COM object, it should marshal the access to the creation thread. Basically, the creation thread uses messages mechanism to process the in-bound calls.

如果一个COM对象是线程安全的，它应该声明为一个MTA对象。MTA对象可以被多线程访问。