Finding the Unique Device ID in Windows Phone 7 (And Device Manufacturer And Anonymous Windows Live ID)

I’m tired of trying to find things about Windows Phone 7 development, so I’m just going to post links that I find helpful so I can find them later.

Here’s Nick Harris with a handy set of static methods for getting the following unique IDs:

• Device Manufacturer ID
  • DeviceExtendedProperties.TryGetValue(“DeviceManufacturer”, out someObject);
  • example: “HTC”
• Device ID
  • DeviceExtendedProperties.TryGetValue(“DeviceUniqueId”, out someObject);
  • requires ID_CAP_IDENTITY_DEVICE in the app manifest which will trigger a warning to users when they install the app
  • a byte[], converter to a string will looks like
    “12345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890123”
• Anonymous Windows Live ID
  • A 32 character subset at offset 2  of the results of
    “UserExtendedProperties.TryGetValue(“ANID”, out someObject)
  • requires ID_CAP_IDENTITY_USER in the app manifest which will trigger a warning to users when they install the app
  • looks like “00FF00FF00FF00FF00FF00FF00FF00FF”

However, if you just need any unique identifier (not necessarily a device ID), you can always set and store a new global unique identifier using:

Guid.NewGuid();

which will return a 128-bit integer that will look something like this:

“e81644f1-46b6-4994-2903-1d1f1440c130”

This will not cause warnings to appear when the app is downloaded because it isn’t a constant identifier to that specific device.