Windows® CE 3.0 Application Programming

Chapter 5. Processes and Threads

An application can be thought of as the .exe in the object store. When the application is run, a process is created. Therefore, a process is an instance of the application. There can be multiple instances of an application running at any one time; however, in devices such as the Pocket PC, it is considered best practice to have only a single instance running at any one time.

Each process starts off with a single, or primary thread. This thread starts executing code at the entry point, which is typically WinMain or main in most applications. An application can create additional threads to perform background tasks or to wait for some operation to complete. Using additional threads means that the primary thread ...