You've probably noticed that some of the applications on Pocket PC 2003 and SmartPhones have this fancy looking gradient background. In all these cases it looks like a system list view control have been used... A quick search through a PPC 2003 SDK returns this result in the  List View Styles: "LVS_EX_GRADIENT Draws a background with a gradient. " Bingo! We're almost there. We know that ListView control in Compact Framework is just a wrapper for a native one, so here is the code that'll do the job:

//Some PInvokes and constants
[DllImport("coredll.dll")]
public static extern IntPtr GetCapture();

[DllImport("coredll.dll")]
private static extern int SendMessage(IntPtr hWnd, uint Msg, int wParam, int lParam);

const int LVS_EX_GRADIENT  =       0x20000000;
const int LVM_SETEXTENDEDLISTVIEWSTYLE  = 0x1000 + 54;

private void SetGradient(ListView listView)
{
     //Get a list view handle
     listView.Capture = true;
     IntPtr hList = GetCapture();
     //Apply extended style
     SendMessage(hList, (uint)LVM_SETEXTENDEDLISTVIEWSTYLE, 0, LVS_EX_GRADIENT);
     listView.Capture = false;
     listView.Refresh();
}