I was writing a chapter of my book Data Services with Silverlight 2 last night about using SOAP, 
ASMX, and WCF web services from Silverlight and I decided ot put a small section in it regarding how to hit the Live Search web service. Creating your own services is great but there is an increasing number of web services available to everyone from sites like Live Search, Flickr, Amazon, EBay, Yahoo, and more. These services allow you to tap into their vast API’s and build off of them for your own purposes. This really opens the doors to what can be done on the web since we don’t have to recreate the wheel in many cases.
So i decided to include a brief example of using some of the services in my book. Last night I wrote about using Live Search There is some decent documentation about how to hook into the service, reference it, invoke it, ways to tweak the queries, and what the results will look like. You can browse through the following sites to find some good information:
- Live Search SDK
- This is a good starting point of the MSDN documentation for Live Search
- Getting Started with the API
- Shows how to acquire an AppID for using Live Search. This is the personal key for your usage.
- API Reference
- Shows all of the classes that are exposed by the service. Pretty cool stuff in here and very extensive.
- Example
- There are some less than stellar examples of using Live Search. This is the one downpoint IMO. The samples are OK, and there are comments that explain what is going on. But there is so much to querying to Live Search service that this can be daunting. The examples are OK, but they could use some serious improvement.
I’m having a blast going through some services and hooking them into Silverlight applications for my book and for some upcoming conferences at VSLive NYC, DevConnections in Las Vegas, and VSLive in Dallas.
