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Issue with the window focus in WinRT

I've got an issue with the focus management in WinRT. The issue is specific for the application startup. Let me share the example of it:
If during the startup I change the focus (for instance I can start selecting some text in a browser), the runtime will decide that it doesn't need to show the application. The application is being started in a 'hidden mode'. It means that I do not see the UI, but I still can find it in process explorer.
So what I need here is to make the application be active in all possible cases. I tried to use several native functions such as ShowWindow, SetActiveWindow, SetForegroundWindow, but without any success.
I also noticed that any WinRT app is being started under WWAHOST.exe and mainwindowhandle is 0. The app shows up if I use 'Switch to' option in Process Explorer context menu.

WinRT applications are sandboxed and have very little control on the way the OS handles them, and almost no way to affect the behavior of other applications running on the same host. What I would suggest then is for you to design your application in such a way that it shows some UI as early as possible, then asynchronously you can load any other resources that your application may need.

My own taskbar for Win CE

I've created WinCE 6.0 image without taskbar. So all app's maximized to full screen.
I want create my own app like taskbar. I want add only few buttons to this taskbar. But I want That other app in their maximized mode don't hide this task bar. And I don't want make my all top most, because they hide some part of other app.
How can I make my app like task bar?

You could modify the existing taskbar in the current Explore shell (source at %WINCEROOT%\PUBLIC\SHELL\OAK\HPC\EXPLORER\TASKBAR\taskbar.cpp or is that's not flexible enough, you could create your own Shell and create your own "taskbar-like" behavior however you'd like.
In either case, remember to clone the code to your own BSP tree! Don't modify the public tree.

The approach I've taken and works is to write a custom kiosk shell based on the explorer.exe code built in visual studio. You could use platform builder as well, kind of the same tool now a days. Looking back I'd say it was a bit heavy handed and it took a little bit of refactoring to CTaskBar and explorer to subclass CTaskBar to our needs, but it produced a shell that we could lock and unlock with complete explorer capabilities. Perhaps a lighterweight approach would be to register your app's window as the taskbar (sorry the system call escapes me) and handle the taskbar specific messages in your winproc?

c# read syslistview32 items tooltips via winapi

i want to write an application, which reads under windows xp the quick launch items in the order like they are located in the taskbar,
and sets hotkeys for each of these item.
windows + 1 should start the first application
windows + 2 the second, etc.
(like in windows 7)
all of these items are found i a folder, but if i read the items of this folder, i dont get the right order of these items.
i found two solutions the get the right order - first:
in the registry an entry is found, where its saved how they are located, but not in plain text. i dont know how to read this, and cant reverse engine it.
the second:
read via winapi the items tooltip from the taskbar, so i can (if there are not items with the same name) search via the name in the quick launch folder.
the quick launch bar is just a listview (syslistview32).
via sendmessage i got it work to count the items, and start one (faking a click on this item), but how the hell can i read the tooltip?
i have googled a lot, tried everything, but i didnt get it run.
i hope you have any snippets for me, to solve this problem.
cheers

Determining the order of the items in the Quick Launch toolbar programmatically is going to be inherently fragile. There's not an API exposed for this, which means that it's subject to change in future versions of Windows, breaking your code that relied on assumptions about undocumented implementation details.
However, this is less of a problem in this specific case than it normally would be, since the Quick Launch toolbar doesn't exist anymore (or, at least, no one uses it anymore). The last version of Windows that used the Quick Launch toolbar was Vista, so if you make sure that your code is compatible with Vista and earlier, you should be fine. It won't work with newer versions anyway.
The positions of items in the Quick Launch toolbar is stored in the Registry in the following key:
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Streams\Desktop
You can extract the information from there, parse and interpret it, and then use it as you like. As you mention, this information isn't stored in plain text form because that would be very slow for the shell to load and parse itself. Since this is undocumented and not designed to be used by clients, they had no particular benefit in making it user (or developer) friendly. All that matters is what's most efficient for the shell, and storing the binary information from its internal structures is the obvious choice.
You will need to reverse engineer this in order for it to be useful to you. The way I'd go about it is probably by setting up a test environment with a couple of items in the Quick Launch bar in a particular order, exporting the information from the Registry, moving one of the items around, exporting the updated information from the Registry, and comparing the two exported Registry files to see what changed. Rinse and repeat as many times as necessary to deduce the pattern. (Really makes you wonder why so many developers actually do take the time to reverse-engineer undocumented aspects of Windows, doesn't it?)
The other option would be to use Spy++ to investigate the windows that implement the taskbar and its Quick Launch toolbar. I don't have a pre-Windows 7 system around, but it sounds like from the question that you've already done this and determined that the Quick Launch toolbar is implemented using a standard ListView. If you know the name of that window (and the names of its ancestor windows), you can walk through those windows to obtain a handle to the window you're interested in. And then you can determine the order of the items in the window as if it were a standard ListView in your own application.
The documentation for ListView controls is here; that should get you started in the right direction. You can get the text of one of the subitems by sending the LVM_GETITEMTEXT message.
This is probably the easier way of doing it. The same caveats apply--there is nothing keeping future versions of Windows from changing the names of those windows or the way that the taskbar is implemented, but since the only versions of Windows that have a Quick Launch toolbar have already been released (and therefore aren't likely to change), this may not be a big problem.
Then again, with the fact of the Quick Launch toolbar's obsolescence in mind, I struggle to comprehend why this endeavor is even worthy of investing developer time.
Also, even once you get this program all written and installed, consider what happens when the user adds a new item to the Quick Launch toolbar or re-arranges the existing items. How is your utility going to know that and adjust the keyboard shortcuts accordingly? What if an installer adds/removes an item from the Quick Launch toolbar?

Multimonitor taskbar in .Net

I have an idea to write a multimotor taskbar application in c# for windows xp. So, does anyone have any information how
to put a taskbar on the second
monitor,
to make it use windows styles,
to prevent aplications running on the
second monitor to appear in default
taskbar,
so on...
Any help would be ...helpful )))

You can P/Invoke SHAppBarMessage() to create a task bar. The APPBARDATA.hWnd you'll need could simply be the Handle of a Form class. Anything goes as far as what you display.
Getting the notifications you'll need to make the task bar display active windows is going to be a whole lot more difficult. You'll need to use the global WH_SHELL hook, set by SetWindowsHookEx() to receive the notifications you'll need. You cannot set this hook in C#, it requires an unmanaged DLL that you can inject into a process. You'll find crucial help in this project.
Getting the Windows taskbar to not do its normal job is going to be impossible unless you somehow find the undocumented information you'll need. Microsoft doesn't document this for a good reason, the taskbar is an important part of the way they innovate on the Windows look-and-feel. Quite visible in Win7. They don't want any code to take a dependency on this, they'd have a near-impossible job of keeping the next version of Windows compatible. I'd have to recommend you completely disable the Windows taskbar and replace it by your own.

How can we prevent popup windows appearing on top of the application?

I have a fullscreen window, and I want to prevent pop up windows that appear at the right bottom corner of my screen. I set the Topmost property to true, but apparently it does not help. I also tried activating the form and giving it the focus once it got deactivated, but that did not help either. What is a way to ignore such windows while the user is engaged with the fullscreen app? I am .NET programming in C#.

You can't do it, this fails the "what if two programs tried to do this" test:
those popups are just normal windows like yours, they also use the same top-most style you are using.
if there was a way to always be above other topmost windows they would have used it too rendering it useless (because the authors of the other apps are just as concerned about the user missing their "super important" notifications as you are about them interfering with your full screen app).
You can try and play dirty tricks to force your window to the top of the top-most z-order, but those popups are likely to use the exact same tricks, again making this all useless (and as an extra bonus all those dirty tricks can turn your app into a compatibility nightmare).

You can disable these balloon notifications using these steps:
Click Start, Run and type regedit
Navigate to the following subkey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
In the right pane, create a DWORD value named EnableBalloonTips
Double-click the new entry, and give it a value of 0.
Quit Registry Editor.
Log off Windows (this is not very cool...), and then log back on for the changes to take effect.
if you need help in how doing this by program, don't hesitate to ask ;)

I don't think that you can block all the popups, windows might not let you do that. But you can try with SetWindowPos function and pass it HWND_TOP parameter. It might work a little better than Topmost = true.

I used a sys tray popup control on my personal project SvnRadar written in WPF.
The control is at the http://www.hardcodet.net/projects/wpf-notifyicon written by Philipp Sumi.
Very nice.Only thing you will be need to "detach" it from the SysTray screen coordinates and
make it appear where you wish.
Hope it helps.
Good luck.