Getting Device Information in WindowsPhone 7

Ibrahim Ersoy
Dec 15, 2010

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Assuming you need to get some information from your Windows Phone 7 Device, I will be showing you how to do it easily.

As I am using an emulator, we won't get healthy results about Device ID. So you will need to test it in a real device.

So here it goes.

We will be getting the following information in our sample:

Manufacturer
Device Name
Device ID
Firmware Version
Hardware Version
Total Memory
Application Current Memory Usage
Application Peak Memory Usage

In this sample we will be getting this information in every 3 seconds using DispatcherTimer and show the results in 8 textblock controls.

I have designed this for our sample:

Here its XAML:

<phone:PhoneApplicationPage
   x:Class="WindowsPhoneApplication2.MainPage"
   xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
   xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
   xmlns:phone="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
   xmlns:shell="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Shell;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
   xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008"
   xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
   mc:Ignorable="d" d:DesignWidth="480" d:DesignHeight="768"
   FontFamily="{StaticResource PhoneFontFamilyNormal}"
   FontSize="{StaticResource PhoneFontSizeNormal}"
   Foreground="{StaticResource PhoneForegroundBrush}"
   SupportedOrientations="Portrait" Orientation="Portrait"
   shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True">

Manufacturer = textBlock2
Device Name = textBlock4
Device ID = textBlock6
Firmware Version = textBlock8
Hardware Version = textBlock10
Total Memory = textBlock12
Application Current Memory Usage = textBlock14
Application Peak Memory Usage = textBlock16

So let's write some code for getting the info.

First of all we're creating a DispatcherTimer object

DispatcherTimer timer;

You'll need to add System.Windows.Threading namespace to use DispatcherTimer.

Add a string variable to get Device ID in string format:

public static string val;

Write a function that returns Device ID in byte. But we're converting the result to a string value.

public static byte[] GetDeviceUniqueID()
{
   byte[] result = null;
   object uniqueId;
   if (DeviceExtendedProperties.TryGetValue("DeviceUniqueId", out uniqueId))
   {
       result = (byte[])uniqueId;
   }
   val=Convert.ToBase64String(result);
   return result;
}

I found and changed a bit of this code in Nick Harris's Blog: http://www.nickharris.net/2010/09/windows-phone-7-how-to-find-the-device-unique-id-windows-live-anonymous-id-and-manufacturer/

We can get the Device ID in a byte array. But we could iterate (using a for-loop) through the array and get some values. But it would be unnecessary. So we are converting our byte array into a string to read it more clearly and assign it to a static string variable named "val"

Next we are adding the following code to our Page's constructor to start Timer and get Unique Device ID:

timer = new DispatcherTimer();
timer.Interval = new TimeSpan(0, 0, 3);
timer.Tick += new EventHandler(timer_Tick);
timer.Start();
GetDeviceUniqueID();

And add our timer_Tick function:

void timer_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e)
{

try
   {
    textBlock2.Text = DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue("DeviceManufacturer").ToString();
    textBlock4.Text = DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue("DeviceName").ToString();
    textBlock6.Text = val;
    textBlock8.Text = DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue("DeviceFirmwareVersion").ToString();
    textBlock10.Text = DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue("DeviceHardwareVersion").ToString();
    textBlock12.Text = DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue("DeviceTotalMemory").ToString();
    textBlock14.Text = DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue("ApplicationCurrentMemoryUsage").ToString();
    textBlock16.Text = DeviceExtendedProperties.GetValue("ApplicationPeakMemoryUsage").ToString();
   }
   catch (Exception ex)
   {

}

}

We can use DeviceExtendedProperties to get information about WP7 Device. The parameters are as described here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff941122(v=VS.92).aspx

After we run the application.

We will be getting our information about WP7 Device:

As I have said before since we're using an emulator we won't be getting an acceptable Device ID. So the result is as you see. But if you try it with a real WP7 device, I'm sure you'll get real results.

Hope this article helps you.

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