Windows 7 Sensor and Location platform: What is it? (Part 1/3)

One of components Windows 7 is Sensor and Location platform. Sensor and Location is part of Windows 7 which allows to work with various sensors and additional devices for measurement something.

What for it is necessary? Sensors are necessary to make more simple some trivial actions. Especially actually it for owners of laptops, whose life is very dynamical. Imagine, that the ambient sensor which is accessible to all applications is built in the computer and gives the chance to these applications to correct the picture depending on illumination. Other example the sensor of GPS-coordinates can be. In this case applications can be adjusted that depend on district where you are at present. For example, applications can display the information on weather for that city where you are. It is possible to see a considerable quantity of examples, all depends on imagination and concrete cases. Applications which change the behavior depending on external conditions are allocated in a separate class of applications and are named context-aware applications.

There can be a question - “and what, actually, has changed?”, “why it could not be made earlier?”. The answer is simple - earlier these scenarios also could be implemented. However, to make it was not so simply. Actually, work with external sensors was exchange of information through COM-port and each sensor had specific API. For this reason it was very heavy to organise any universal program interface with which it was possible to work simultaneously from several applications.

This problem is solved by Sensor and Location library. With its help it is possible to access to various sensors and to receive from them the information in uniform style for all. It is important, that this problem has been solved at level of operational system. It can give a new push for development of context-aware applications. Further the diagramme of structure of objects for work with sensors is displayed. In following parts we will consider it more in detail.

For sensor connection to Sensor and Location platform in Windows 7 it is necessary to implement for it the driver and simple classes-wrappers on.NET for work with this sensor.

Certainly, in the near future end users hardly can feel power of all this platform to the full. For this purpose it is needed some time that developers of hardware could develop in the hardware platforms some sensors hardware platforms. However, to us, developers, it is possible to start to prepare for it already today. Therefore further I plan to tell about how to work with Sensor and Location platform in a context of business applications.