Just going through some old draft posts and found this one, which might be of use to somebody. Let’s call it a Quick Post as there’s not too much substance…

When writing a Universal Windows application we’re basically trying to write code that will work on multiple devices. But different devices have different capabilities. For example a mobile phone has a back button, so we might want to handle the back button BackPressed event in some way, but this event is not available when the application is run on a desktop machine.

Obviously it’d be no good using #define to enable/disable code as we want the application’s code to be universal and run “as-is” on multiple devices. So we need a method call at runtime to tell us whether the device supports the BackButton. Or more specifically whether it supports the HardwareButtons input mechanism.

So to check whether we can hook up code to the BackPressed event we might code the following

if(ApiInformation.IsTypePresent("Windows.Phone.UI.Input.HardwareButtons"))
{
   HardwareButtons.BackPressed += HandleBackPressed;
}