We had a good turnout for the hands on lab this month. Bill Wolff started the evening by getting everyone to sign up for a Bing API id. You can get one here http://www.bing.com/developers/createapp.aspx. He then went on to build a simple web search page using the Bing web service and lots of CSS code. He has the source on his blog.

I followed by going a little lower tech. I wanted to show some jQuery code that would allow you to connect to Bing using Ajax. I started with a simple HTML page that used the URL method to search Bing and have a callback routine run – all in JavaScript. I then modified the code substituting jQuery calls for the straight JavaScript.

The final step was to convert all the JavaScript into code that would rely on the jQuery library and show that it could be done with less code than straight JavaScript. I also added some extras to the final output just to show how it could be done.

The files can be found on my SkyDrive or by clicking here. You will need to signup for a Bing API id to make them work. You will also need the jQuery library to make the second and third files work. You can get the jQuery library from http://jquery.com 

These examples are to show jQuery and Ajax, so they aren’t pretty from an end users perspective – but you can do that on your own so play with them and see what you can come up with.

And if you have questions about what we’ve shown or have ideas of what you would like to see in the future please leave a comment.

At the latest Philly.Net Hands On Lab we tried to create an example using the ListView and an RSS feed. The ListView example was taken from the demo that Joe Stagner did here. Unfortunately his site was not working for the demo so we switched it to my blog.

If you want to see the final ASPX page you can get to it here.

Remember you can find more jQuery information at jQuery.com.

At the previous regular meeting of Philly.Net

I also gave a short intro presentation about jQuery. If you would like to have the presentation you can download it from here.

I hope these presentations helped you get started. Let me know what else you’d like to know about jQuery by leaving a comment.

Thanks.