Vibrating the phone

Windows Phone Tutorial

A little vibration added to your application can be just the haptic feedback needed. It turns out that vibration is absurdly easy to add; so much so that discussions of adding vibration typically come with the caveat that you want to use it sparingly; too much of a good thing can make for a very annoying application.

To see how to add vibration to an application, let’s start by creating a new application named Vibrate. 

The UI is dead simple, just a button centered on MainPage.xaml,

<Button
   Content="Vibrate"
   Name="Vibrate" 
   Height="100"
   Width="300"/>

The event handler for this button will call the Vibrate Controller’s Start method passing in a value for how long to vibrate.  You’ll need to add a using statement for Microsoft.Devices.

 void Vibrate_Click( 
     object sender, 
     RoutedEventArgs e )
 {
     VibrateController.Default.Start( 
         TimeSpan.FromMilliseconds( 200 ) );
 }

That’s really all there is to it.  Press the button, the phone vibrates.  You can imagine using this in a game of course, but also for specific (and startling) feedback in other applications as well.