The Moth

Visual Studio 2005 includes some of the remote tools that previously we had to install eVC to get. They are still not integrated in the IDE but you can find them from the Windows Start menu same place where the VS2005 item is. The Windows CE Remote Spy didn't work in pre-release versions but obviously with RTM it does so take it for a spin. One of its features is listing all windows on the target including the handle, caption and class. The typical way you use this info is with FindWindow e.g. as shown here for programmatically closing any open msgbox on your device.

Anyway... If you use Remote Spy with Compact Framework v1 SP3 applications, you'll find that the class name of the CF forms show up as #NETCF_AGL_BASE_. If you go a step further, reference the Microsoft.WindowsCE.Forms assembly and then simply create an instance of the MessageWindow, you will observe how its class is #NETCF_AGL_MSG_. I was told a long time ago not to rely on these facts as they are internal implementation details of the NETCF windowing system. Well, I checked for v2 apps and nothing has changed with those two.

However, there is another special window that every CF v1 application has (one per app instance) and that has a class of #NETCF_AGL_PARK_. Furthermore, its caption is the file system path to your application. This *has changed* with CF v2: now its caption is empty, and the class is #NETCF_AGL_PARK_ appended with the application's file system path.

The moral of the story is, if you do take advantage of undocumented features, your application may break when you move it to the next version regardless of the compatibility efforts of the product teams at MSFT.