Someone asked me today “How do I get my CF window to not show up in the taskbar?”  Since Form.ShowInTaskbar isn't supported in the CF, I decided to play around and see how it's done.

It led me to play around with the SDF's Win32Window and EnumEx classes.  Basically, populate a couple ListViews with all the available style and extended style bits, then let the user check whatever s/he wants and reapply them.

187 lines of code later and I've got a very busy window (check out the caption bar) but it's still in the Taskbar.  Turns out to be not-so-easy after all - so I'll keep trying, but here's a quick sample on using the Win32Window.

Here's the meat of it:

private void ParentWindow_Load(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

      m_child.Show();              

      m_childWindow = Win32Window.FindWindow(null, "ChildWindow");

      WS childStyle = m_childWindow.Style;

      foreach(WS style in EnumEx.GetValues(typeof(WS)))

      {

            ListViewItem lvi = new ListViewItem(style.ToString());

            lvi.Checked = ((childStyle & style) != 0);

            lvwWS.Items.Add(lvi);

      }

      WS_EX childExStyle = m_childWindow.ExtendedStyle;

      foreach(WS_EX exstyle in EnumEx.GetValues(typeof(WS_EX)))

      {

            ListViewItem lvi = new ListViewItem(exstyle.ToString());

            lvi.Checked = ((childExStyle & exstyle) != 0);

            lvwWSEX.Items.Add(lvi);

      }

}

private void btnSetStyle_Click(object sender, System.EventArgs e)

{

      WS style = 0;

      foreach(ListViewItem lvi in lvwWS.Items)

      {

            if(lvi.Checked)

                  style |= (WS)EnumEx.Parse(typeof(WS), lvi.Text);

      }

      m_childWindow.Style = style;

      WS_EX exstyle = 0;

      foreach(ListViewItem lvi in lvwWSEX.Items)

      {

            if(lvi.Checked)

                  exstyle |= (WS_EX)EnumEx.Parse(typeof(WS_EX), lvi.Text);

      }

      m_childWindow.ExtendedStyle = exstyle;

      m_child.Refresh();

}

PostScript:

It turns out this is right.  If you modify the style of the Form during it's contructor, then it will not show up in the Taskbar (thanks Sergey).

public ChildWindow()

{

      InitializeComponent();

      Capture = true;

      Win32Window hwnd = Win32Window.GetCapture();

      Capture = false;

      hwnd.ExtendedStyle |= WS_EX.NOANIMATION;

}