Developers looking to bundle Silverlight and Bing together into their Cloud applications now have the necessary development tools to do so. The Silverlight software development kit for Bing was released to CodePlex on July 27, 2009 and is currently available for download. The SDK is an open-source project offered under the Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) and available free of charge to all developers that see potential into marrying Bing and Silverlight. Essentially, the SDK allows Bing applications to be created by using Silverlight, revealed Alessandro Catorcini, lead program manager, Bing API.

One of the components of the SDL is a “reusable framework extension to the Microsoft Silverlight Toolkit. This framework is designed to provide support controls for the sample Bing component, but also to provide an additional reusable view control toolkit for implementing and using some of the advanced data metaphors shown in the Bing search component,” Catorcini noted. “Components such as the CloudView, TileView, BandCloudView and StackView can be used in any Silverlight application. All the controls in this assembly support theme-ing and accessibility. All these controls are built on the same infrastructure as the Silverlight Toolkit controls.”

Of course the software development kit is tailored to the latest iteration of Microsoft's alternative for Adobe Flash. In this regard, the SDK brings to the table a working sample control for Silverlight 3. Developers can leverage the SDK in order to create custom Bing experiences via Silverlight, which can redefine the way that search results are being consumed by end users. Bing was introduced at the end of May 2009, with the worldwide rollout complete by early June. Silverlight 3 RTW (3.0.40624.0) was released to web in the first half of this month.

In addition, the Silverlight SDK for Bing offers: “The Bing Silverlight service runtime itself - an assembly called Microsoft.Bing.Data. This assembly houses the service proxy for the Bing API, as well as a flexible interface contract for implementing search providers, and a concrete singleton implementation for use in data binding and consuming results from Bing. Rich documentation of all the types and classes used in the project,” Catorcini said.

Silverlight SDK for Bing can be downloaded from here.

Silverlight 3 RTW (3.0.40624.0) is available for download here.