Terminating a Process

The most common way to terminate a process is to have it return from a WinMain function call. You can also terminate a process by having the primary thread of the process call the ExitThread function. A Windows CE process automatically terminates if its primary thread is terminated, even if there are other active threads in existence for the process. ExitThread returns the exit code of the process. You can determine the exit code of a process by calling the GetExitCodeProcess function. Specify the handle to the process, which you can obtain by calling the CreateProcess or OpenProcess function; the function returns the exit code. If the process is still running, the function returns the STILL_ACTIVE termination status.

There are also other, less common, ways of terminating a process:

• Use interprocess synchronization to instruct the process to terminate itself.

  For more information on using interprocess communication to terminate a process, see "Interprocess Synchronization."

• If the process has a message queue, send a WM_CLOSE message to the main window of the process. An application might not close if it does not receive this message and might display a message box.
• Use the TerminateProcess function, which does not notify any attached DLLs that the process is terminating. This method should be used as a last resort.

Note A process immediately terminates if a related secondary thread generates an unhandled exception. This is a change in behavior from Windows CE version 2.10 or earlier.