News
Live Search Service and SDK Bow
Microsoft has released version 1 of the Live Search Web service and the Live Search Software Developers Kit.
Hoping it will encourage developers to build applications on top of its emerging Live Services initiative, Microsoft has released version 1 of the Live Search Web service and the Live Search Software Developers Kit -- previously known as the MSN Search SDK Beta 0.6.
These pieces will fall under a new, Live-branded collection of dev tools. "While we announced the Live Search API and SDK release yesterday, we've been posting updates to other Windows Live docs along the way more silently [and] now we're ready to officially name the collected set the Windows Live SDK," said a Jan. 27 news posting on Microsoft's dev.live.com site.
This gathering of the diverse SDKs for Live services under the single banner of the Windows Live SDK is one of the first steps toward establishing a "platform" of sorts, which developers can use to take advantage of Live services.
The search service API lets developers programmatically submit queries and retrieve results from the Windows Live Search Engine using SOAP. Applications can be developed in any Microsoft .NET language for Windows or the Web.
The SDK provides documentation regarding core concepts, requirements, development guidelines and the class library for the Live Search Web service. It also supplies sample code that shows application development techniques using the Web service.
The service's new capabilities include weather and movie-time queries, support for keyword/place-name queries and up to 1,000 results returned per query. It also provides support for file-type filtering and enhanced functionality for search tags, as well as support for additional markets.
More information on the Windows Live and Live Search SDKs is available at
http://dev.live.com/Services.aspx.
About the Author
Stuart J. Johnston has covered technology, especially Microsoft, since February 1988 for InfoWorld, Computerworld, Information Week, and PC World, as well as for Enterprise Developer, XML & Web Services, and .NET magazines.