Windows Sensor And Location Platforms

This page acts as a supplement to the information contained in the MSDN Library. Here you will find white papers, code samples, PowerPoint presentations, links to videos and 3rd-party content, and other resources about this technology that are relevant to developer concerns.

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Forums and Discussions

The Sensor and Location Platform community, including Microsoft product team members, are active in forum discussions. Those discussions take place on the MSDN forum site at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowssensorandlocationplatform.

Code Samples

(All code sample can be found by clicking the Downloads tab on this Code Gallery page)

Sensor Development Kit for Windows 7 http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=SensorsAndLocation&DownloadId=5856
The Sensor Development Kit for Windows 7 contains the complete source code of the following components:
* Board firmware
* Drivers for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7
* Diagnostic tool for testing the Sensor Development Kit board
The Sensor Development Kit uses the Freescale Flexis™ JM Badge Board. If you install the Sensor Development Kit software on this board, applications that are sensor-enabled and that run on Windows 7 can use information from sensors on the board. For more information about this kit, please visit www.microsoft.com/whdc/sensors.

Windows 7 Sensor and Location .NET Interop Sample Library (http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=SensorsAndLocation&DownloadId=5039) The Sensor and Location .NET Interop Sample Library provides an abstraction of the native Sensor and Location API and strongly typed objects for specific sensors for its Sensor Data Report. For example, a light sensor has a strongly typed LightDataReport object. With the Sensor and Location .NET Interop Sample Library, you can create strongly-typed custom sensor objects as well as use the three built-in sensors: Accelerometer3D sensors, Light sensors, and Touch Array sensors. These sensors are part of the Windows 7 Sensor Development kit. This library also provides a unified location API that determines location. With the Location platform, you can use the same APIs regardless of the underlying technology that is providing data, such as GPS, Wi-Fi triangulation, or IP Resolver.

Enhanced Default Location Provider (eDLP) http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=SensorsAndLocation&DownloadId=5857
The Enhanced Default Location Provider (eDLP) enables users to click on a map to set the location reported by the Location API. This tool is build on the Windows 7 Sensor and Location .NET Interop Sample Library and Virtual Earth SDK to provide a convenient GUI based tool for setting the computer’s geographic and civic address.

Sensor Diagnostic Tool http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Project/Download/FileDownload.aspx?ProjectName=SensorsAndLocation&DownloadId=5858
The Sensor Diagnostic Tool is useful when debugging drivers and applications that use the Sensor and Location APIs. The tool provides the states, data, and events of all sensors as well as the Location API in real time. It can also log sensor events for future analysis. The tool is built on the Windows 7 Sensor and Location .NET Interop Sample Library.

Conference Presentations

PDC08: The Sensor and Location Platform: Building Context-Aware Applications (http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/PC25/) Windows 7 introduces a platform for using sensor devices, such as light sensors or GPS sensors, to create environmental or location awareness in programs. In this session, you will learn how to use sensors to make your programs more functional, easier to use, and more aware of the surrounding environment.

White Papers

Introducing the Windows Sensor and Location Platform (http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/d/f/adf1347d-08dc-41a4-9084-623b1194d4b2/Introducing_Sensors.docx) This paper provides an overview of a new development platform from Microsoft that facilitates the use of sensors, including location sensors such as global positioning system (GPS) devices, in the Windows 7 operating system.

Implementing Light-Aware UI Using the Windows Sensor and Location Platform (http://download.microsoft.com/download/a/d/f/adf1347d-08dc-41a4-9084-623b1194d4b2/Implementing_Light_Aware_UI.docx) This paper covers the use of ambient light sensor data, and how user interface features and program content can be optimized for many lighting conditions.