Microsoft, in collaboration with The New York Times, introduced at the start of May 2009 the Silverlight 2 Kit for the New York Times Open application programming interfaces. The New York Times Silverlight Kit is designed to allow developers to easily take advantage of the services offered for free by the news outlet as REST services via the NY Times Developer Network. According to Microsoft, the services list includes: article search, best sellers, campaign finance, community, congress, movie reviews, NY state legislature, real estate, Times newswire, Times People and Times tags. Following the initial introduction, the two companies have made the Silverlight 2 Kit for the New York Times Open APIs available as an open-source project through the Redmond company's repository for open-source software: CodePlex.

“Since Silverlight works very well with REST services, we wanted to make it easy for designers and developers to use these services in their applications. To do this we are releasing with the New York Times a New York Times Silverlight Kit which includes CLR objects and Value Converter to enable designers and developers to take advantage of these services in their applications,” revealed Michael S. Scherotter, developer evangelist, Communications Sector of North America, Microsoft.

A couple of websites have been set up and are now live on the web, allowing developers to get a taste of what the Silverlight Kit can be used for. An actual demonstration of the kit along with an application based on the NY Times Silverlight Kit that enables users to search for information on musicians are the two demos available. The Silverlight 2 Kit for the New York Times Open APIs is offered under a Microsoft open-source license, the MS-PL.

“The New York Times has developed a tag set of controlled vocabularies for descriptive subject terms, geographic locations, organization (including companies), and people and they’ve made it available via the TimesTags API. The API operates on a subset of about 27,000 of the entire set of tags. Tags are ranked according to their frequency in current usage. Using this API, you can do partial text matching on terms and get the controlled vocabularies of tags in the New York Times,” Scherotter added.

The Silverlight 2 Kit for the New York Times Open APIs can be downloaded from here.