WP8Dev– How to identify the sensors supported on your Windows Phone

This post will give you an  overview on how to identify the sensors supported on your Windows Phone. As a developer when you are developing for Windows Phone – and your application would need to interact with certain sensors in windows phone to achieve a certain functionality, you would need to verify whether the sensors are supported in  targeted devices.

Windows Phone 8 platform has support for the following sensors

• Motion sensor  
• Accelerometer
• Compass
• Gyroscope

You can access these API’s through the below namespace:

Microsoft.Devices.Sensors

You can check for any of the sensor support through “IsSupported” boolean property of the class

• Motion sensor   [ Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Motion ]
• Accelerometer  [ Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Accelerometer ]
• Compass [ Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Compass ]
• Gyroscope  [ Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Gyroscope ]

Here is the sample code block:

  public static string GetSensors()
        {
               StringBuilder sensorsList = new StringBuilder();

                if (Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Gyroscope.IsSupported)
                {
                    sensorsList.Append("Gyroscope, ");
                }

                if (Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Compass.IsSupported)
                {
                    sensorsList.Append("Compass, ");
                }

                if (Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Accelerometer.IsSupported)
                {
                    sensorsList.Append("Accelerometer, ");
                }

                if (Microsoft.Devices.Sensors.Motion.IsSupported)
                {
                    sensorsList.Append("Motion,");
                }

            return sensorsList.ToString();
        }

Note: Only Accelerometer is supported in Windows Phone 8 emulator. To test remaining capabilities, you would need to deploy the application on a real Windows Phone device.