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;
}
PostPostScript:
This uses SDF 1.4, so if you're trying it, make sure you get the latest code (or wait a day until 1.4 is released)