How to handle a blocked clipboard and other oddities

Question

Over the course of the last couple of hours I have been tracking down a fairly specific bug with that occurs because another application has the clipboard open. Essentially

Answer 1

As the clipboard is shared by all UI applications, you will run into this from time to time. Obviously, you don't want your application to crash if it failed to write to the clipboard, so gracefully handling ExternalException is reasonable. I would suggest presenting an error to the user if the SetObjectData call to write to the clipboard fails.

A suggestion would be to use (via P/Invoke) user32!GetOpenClipboardWindow to see if another application has the clipboard open. It will return the HWND of the window which has the clipboard open, or IntPtr.Zero if no application had it open. You could spin on the value until its IntPtr.Zero for a specified amount of time.