C# IFilter improperly installed in solution?

Where to begin....

I've inherited a application that searches for strings within files from a previous programmer (that had no documenation) its using EPocalipse.IFilter namespace. It has a few issues, the first of which is the VS Project is missing FilterReader.cs, FilterLoader.cs, among others I believe are required for EPocalipse IFilters (based on my research). The second is that the app (when built) is hanging on ReadToEnd() when run against .

I found this thread here: TextReader Read and ReadToEnd hangs without throwing exception

Which was awesome...except no posted solution was given =( Since I have this issue and others, I figured I'd start a new thread since I first want to ensure IFilter is installed properly. The project builds, but still hangs on certain files (usually MS Excel).

For example, if I try to "Go to Definition" in Visual Studio for my instantiation of FilterReader, it simply shows the tab "FilterReader [from metadata]". So I'm assuming the FilterReader.cs file is simply missing (its nowhere in the projects solution explorer either), which may be the cause of the hanging problem as well?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

SK

For detailed info on the subject, take a look at this article [CodeProject]

As for hanging issue, it cannot be easily solved. Basically, there are 2 possible solutions:

1. Apply infinite cycle checks like those in the thread you've found. However, some extremely complex docs may still hang inside of IFilter, and you can do nothing about it (IFilters are COM components, usually closed-source).
2. Make your extraction two-threaded: one thread to monitor the extraction process and stop document extraction when it times out and another thread to do the actual extraction. Should you choose this path, remember that you'll likely run into access violation exceptions, as EPocalypse implementation hasn't COM protection for multi-threaded access to ifilters.