Creating a dialog/popup form in .net CF

I am in a pretty bad mood about this…please forgive me the slightly aggressive slant

I am a programmer who takes pride in designing his UI’s himself – and indeed, many of my Palm OS applications have won awards for simple and well-done interfacing. For me, popping up a dialog over another form is a standard issue – it looks like this on a Palm:

The code for doing this is approx 1 line long; and all you need to do is set the form dimensions and popup styles in Resource XML.

Creating such a dialog is next to impossible on the PocketPC in vb.net – for some strange reason, this absolutely operating system insists on making each and every form “full-screen” – even if you set the dimensions differently(even explicitly in code). All this while a MessageBox floats around the screen merrily…

However, I am not alone with this problem. Looking around in the CF newsgroup brought along the following gem of a thread:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/newsgroups/default.aspx?dg=microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.compactframework&tid=57f3a71b-7166-4b7b-98d6-003453f86c7c&p=1

Essentially, it all comes down to setting FormBorderStyle to none. You then have a form that doesn’t get resized automatically and can be popped up with Form.ShowDialog – but it doesn’t have a frame or title area.

Fabien Decret has a writeup on the “gory details” and also covers creating a simple border around the form – visit his blog here:
http://fabdecret.blogspot.com/2007/05/non-full-screen-window.html

How do you create a popup window in .net CF? If you have an idea, please email it to me at Tamog AT gmx DOT at!

Related posts:

1. A color picker for .NET CF
2. Double Buffering for PocketPC
3. Declaring delegates in a single line
4. Determine a font’s line height in .NET CF(.NET compact framework)
5. Uninstall CeRunAppAtEvent registrations when program is removed