Probably you have wondered how you can set up direct links to the control panel applets (CPL's for short) in Start/Settings of your Pocket PC. For most of the casual users in most of the time creating self-standing links to these files is no needed. But this is really useful – for example, you can include them in Today launcher plug-ins, which do not let access to any of these applets otherwise. Here are some Today launcher plug-ins - Resco Explorer 2005, Spb Pocket Plus 3.1 NEW!, and here are some free ones - tdLaunch v0.0.6 and cLaunch v12.03.

Most of these settings are invoked from a general dialog file located at \Windows\cplmain.cpl. Some additional, custom settings may have been put in a separate file, \Windows\mycpl.cpl and the third-party applications that install their own settings dialogs create their own .cpl files inside the \Windows directory.

First Step to create links:

You need to create a .lnk
33#ctlpnl.exe cplmain.cpl,X or 33#ctlpnl.exe mycpl.cpl,X, where X is a number.

As you are already awared the cplmain.cpl ( mycpl.cpl ) contains most of the settings accessible in Start/Settings. Because of this one file is containing many small applets also means that you need to choose a particular one in some way. That's why you must index the file, and the numeric index (1, 2 etc.) tells cplmain.cpl which particular applet you'd like to access.

You can view CPL table for some example devices here.

Note that WM2003 added the standard 22-Manage Certificates and WM5 the standard 24-Error reporting and, with most WM5 Pocket PC devices, 25-GPS. Also, Pocket PC Phone Edition devices, regardless of their operating system version, also use the 20 - Phone Settings index. Finally, all Pocket PC's with the Microsoft BT stack use 23 – MS Bluetooth too. (Devices with the Widcomm BT stack use the separate \Windows\BTConfigCE.cpl CPL.)

It's also very important to point out that 3 – Power and 6 – Backlight is not necessarily available in all devices. Also note the records starting with MyCpl are non-standard ones. Please note that lists compiled by others (like the XDA-Developers one) are not full at all and may contain some mistakes. But experimenting is good and remember that you won't crash your Pocket PC if a particular index is unused, so feel free to try.

Here is a solution for those of you who do not want to manually create .lnk files.

Werner Ruotsalainen has already done it for you! Just download this file and extract the link files you need.

Note that the root directly of the ZIP file only contains CPL links that are guaranteed to work on all Pocket PC 2002 devices. There is also additional ones in sub-directories for Windows Mobile 2003 and WM5. Also, there's a separate sub-directory mycpl for MyCpl link files.

Feel free to post comments of your experience in creating links and share your thoughts and opinions.