Microsoft Language translation is an interesting service. Not only can you do language translation, you can also detect the language of a particular text. The given class provides a PHP wrapper which will help developers translate text from one language to another in a easy manner. The library also supports caching, helping you keep your translations fast and simple.

His translation library requires an AppId for configuration and cURL to handle the messaging back and forth. Translation is as easy as calling "translate()" on a string, language fetching with "LanguageNames()" and even converting the text to speech with the "speak()" method.

A while ago I wrote in an article about translating tweets in my client Haunt. For the translating itself I was using the Google Translate API, which has sadly be deprecated. Evil after all I suppose. I've now rewritten my translation code to use the Bing Translation APIs instead. You need to register an API key (see http://www.bing.com/developers/appids.aspx) to be able to use the APIs. The APIs that I am using are fairly simple though.

Also included in the post is some sample code showing how to make the request to this new API and the results from the requests.

One of the key features which was required for Emitter.ca, was the ability to geocode search terms like street addresses, cities, and postal codes, that a user enters so that Emitter.ca could easily return facilities that are nearby. To do this, we leveraged Bing Maps's API for performing the Geocode lookup. Microsoft offers a variety of APIs for allowing your application to interact with Bing Maps, however, for Geocoding search terms, we utilized Bing's SOAP API.

He shares the class he uses to pull the information out of the Bing Maps SOAP response and push the details into the properties of a class. The simpel class made interfacing with the API an easy task and allowed for string-based lookups on just about anywhere (like "Toronto, Ontario").

I had several people tell me that while they liked the idea, they didn't want to install WordPress just so they can have intelligent 404 errors. Several other people pinged me and suggested a way that you could use the Bing Search API to handle 404's without WordPress. As a public service, I am going to try and bridge the gap between these two groups. Going on leads provided by friends, I have hammered out a solution that works with Apache and PHP.

The solution uses a custom 404 page (as set in Apache) that pulls in the "top ten" links from the current site as reported back by the Bing.com search engine. With the help of the API making a request and getting back an object to loop through is simple. This could easily be adapted to accept terms based on the content page that they were trying to find or some keywords based on your site's content.

One of the things I've always hated about WordPress is the stock 404 error message. Out of the box, WordPress just tells users "I'm sorry, I can't find what you are looking for." Granted it is better than the stock Apache 404 page but it isn't much more helpful. Having just finished working on the Bing Search Wrapper for PHP, the best use case I could think of for the wrapper was to solve this particular problem. This is how I helped Microsoft's Interoperability team to put together the Bing 404 Plugin for WordPress.

He includes two ways to do it - either watch the video for a quickstart or you can follow the "gory details" on how it all works and how/where to implement it in your WordPress insallation's code.

Back in March I had the opportunity to work on a project for Microsoft that is now coming to light. I was tasked with writing a PHP wrapper for the Bing API that Microsoft has been building. I've written API wrappers before and it is either a fun experience or it is a nightmare, depending on whether the API is easy to work with. I am pleased to report that the Bing Search API is well thought out and very easy to work with. For PHP developers, I am hoping that what I am about to show you makes it even easier.

You'll need an API key to use the interface, but the rest is simple. You just create an instance of the search object, pass it a query and sun the "search" method to return the results. Cal has an example snippet of code in his blog.

Well, since the opening of bing.com I've been playing with the API and some of the options it provides. Certainly I was getting annoyed since I had to rebuild each of my queries if I wanted something so I search for a library that could do this for me which I couldn't find and I ended up writing my own.

His API allows for a fluent interface to interact with Bing and grab the results from a search. The example given searches the site for "gimp" and returns the first ten values in an XML format. You can download the API here.