We have an SDK!

A little over a week ago we released our international version of the MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search.  As part of that release, we shipped BETA support for our developer API.  Actually, CNET and some others found our SDK without us making any fuss about it.  The reason we didn’t (until today) is that we wanted to fix up a couple things before doing so.  So Steve Ickman went back and made a few changes, including seperating the IDL file into two (one for the query interface, and one for protocol handlers).  He also ran them through MIDL and TLBimp to generate interop assemblies for .NET – saving you .NET folks the trouble.  So now you can download the updated SDK.

But that’s not all!  I took some time earlier this week and put together some basic C# Samples.  There are two files… One is a wrapper for the WDS query interface.  It lets you build a query, execute it, and get the results in a .NET DataSet complete with databinding functionality.  There’s also a simple app that demos how you can use this wrapper and the functionality it provides.  Both samples are basic and the UI is a bit crude.  The idea is to give you a place to start, not do all of your work for you 🙂

Here are some other useful links:

The official Windows Desktop Search API documentation.

SDK Update at the official MSN Search blog

Steve Ickman’s blog post about the SDK (very useful!)

Sean Mcleod – The first implementation of our interfaces that I’ve seen. Updated!

Christopher Lauer writes about our SDK including a screenshot of our sample.  Added!

You can bet i’ll be posting more about this soon, including some detailed info about the samples, and maybe more.