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).

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……

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?

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。

我发现现有的解释太官样文章了。下面是我的解释:

STA: If a thread creates a COM object that's set to STA (when calling CoCreateXXX you can pass a flag that sets the COM object to STA mode), then only this thread can access this COM object (that's what STA means - Single Threaded Apartment), other thread trying to call methods on this COM object is under the hood silently turned into delivering messages to the thread that creates(owns) the COM object. This is very much like the fact that only the thread that created a UI control can access it directly. And this mechanism is meant to prevent complicated lock/unlock operations.

MTA: 如果一个线程创建了一个设置为MTA的COM对象，那么几乎每个线程都可以直接调用该对象上的方法。

这差不多就是要点了。虽然从技术上讲，还有一些细节我没有提到，比如在“STA”段落中，创造者线程本身必须是STA。但这几乎是你了解STA/MTA/NA所需要知道的全部内容。

COM线程模型称为“单元”模型，其中初始化的COM对象的执行上下文与单个线程(单线程单元)或多个线程(多线程单元)相关联。在这个模型中，COM对象一旦在一个单元中初始化，就在其运行期间是该单元的一部分。

STA模型用于非线程安全的COM对象。这意味着它们不处理自己的同步。它的一个常见用途是UI组件。因此，如果另一个线程需要与对象交互(例如按表单中的按钮)，则消息将被编组到STA线程上。windows窗体消息泵送系统就是一个例子。

如果COM对象可以处理自己的同步，那么可以使用MTA模型，其中允许多个线程与对象交互，而不需要编组调用。