It's spring in the northern hemisphere, and the Live Search API team is celebrating with features that grow the API and the services you can use it to provide. Our SDK was ahead of the curve: It went live with new documentation and code samples on MSDN and our download center last week. Whether you're getting hotter in the north or getting colder in the south, we've got new features to make your search applications better all around.

We debuted all the new features last week at MIX09 - for more on the goings-on there, see the Live Search blog. In this post, you'll find an overview of the new API features, plus a shout out to a new member of the Live Search team, Microsoft Translator, and a look at the first Live Search API PowerToys codeplex.

New API features

• Video - public at last!
  After determined negotiations, we've achieved sufficient symbiosis with content providers to make the Video SourceType available to you with minimal restriction. You'll be able to access Video the same as you would Image, Web, and the rest of our burgeoning crop of SourceTypes.
• MobileWeb - you asked for it.
  The second new SourceType of the spring is MobileWeb, which returns results from the increasingly growing resource of Extensible Hypertext Markup Language (XHTML), Wireless Markup Language (WML) and other mobile Web pages. Functionally, this highly-demanded SourceType gives you everything you get from the Web SourceType, its static sibling - but with content from the mobile world.
• Image Filters
  Many developers have told us that they would benefit from a means of restricting Image SourceType results to those that have specific characteristics - for example, size, aspect, or style. The ImageRequest.Filters Property enables you to use these and more to get exactly the kind of images you want; the new Video SourceType has an analagous VideoRequest.Filters Property.

Microsoft Translator

We're happy to give a shout out to the Microsoft Translator team, which showed off great new features at MIX, such as:

• Microsoft Translator web page widget
  The Microsoft Translator web page widget allows you to bring real-time, in-place translations to your web site. Users can see your pages in their own language, without having to go to a separate translation web site, and share your page with friends in multiple languages. You can learn more about how to use the widget, get help or interact with other website owners on the Microsoft Translator forums. 2
• Microsoft Translator AJAX API
  The Microsoft Translator AJAX API allows you to easily integrate translation functionality into your web applications and sites. You can learn more about the API on MSDN, try out the interactive SDK or interact with other developers on the Microsoft Translator forums.

For more information, check out the Translator team's blog.

PowerToys Codeplex

And, completing this Equinox treasure trio, a PowerToy* for the Live Search API. This PowerToy consists of sample code that demonstrates the ease with which a developer can create a control that takes advantage of Live Search API capabilities, as well as the ease with which such a control can be deployed on a page.

You can see an example of such a control in the Washington on the Web section in the lower right of this outdoor-recreation-website-in-progress. The control plays a slideshow based on images returned from a query sent to the API's Image SourceType . The control is written in C#, and the aspx page can be set up at design time to use the ImageRequest.Filters Property to filter the images based on query term, size, color and style.

To get started, download the sample code from Silk Road PowerToys.

* PowerToys are Microsoft product productivity tools developed after a release. They are not an official part of the product and are not supported by Microsoft.

Happy Equinox and Happy Developing - The Live Search API Team