My good friend Nigel Parker over at Microsoft beat me to the post with his excellent blog post on Marker Studio‘s new search site for Yellow and customised IE8 browser experience:

The launch has been very successful with over 10,000 downloads of the Yellow IE8 browser in the first 2 days!

To add a bit of technical detail to Nigel’s post we made heavy usage of the Google Search Ajax APIs. I kind of wish they still had the SOAP apis as it would have been easier in many respects using .net to bind the results using server side asp.net rather than be forced to work primarily with the ajax apis. Also, the ajax apis come with handy code snippets http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/ but they assumed things like ajax calls for paging requests which means the user can’t bookmark the urls. Aside from that a few workarounds here and there got us enabling Google integrated search quite easily. I would like people to note that the Live Search apis were superior in terms of the range of ways one could consume search services, and relevance in my book is very comparable between the two.

We made use of Linq to XML when consuming the core Yellow listings api which is REST based. This made the consumption and binding of the search results to the page using a standard asp.net repeater much easier. In fact, i cringed to think of the additional effort that was involved before Linq for XML in navigating XML Documents with the .net 2.0 xml apis which I never found particularly intuitive.

There is also some Salesforce integration for helping to manage competition entries where we created custom lead objects in Salesforce. It’s kind of nice to have the ability to regenerate the wsdl for the web service after you make changes in the gui to core field information. It would be even nicer to have this discoverable at runtime so i could just regenerate proxies using a url rather than having to download the wsdl and re-run svcutil across the wsdl locally.

And let’s not forget our good friend JQuery, and loving that Intellisense support in Vs.Net 2008;) Also a shout to facebox for those obligatory modals with rounded corners.

Oh, and the whole thing is powered by Kentico CMS. Kentico CMS is a powerful, flexible and affordable content and document management system that i have been personally recommending to all and sundry since i first came across it in 2005. At Marker <shamelessPlug>we have a great team of experienced Kentico developers should you be looking in this direction. Please give me a yell if you would like to discuss further</shamelessPlug>. ]]> http://www.markerstudio.com/marketing/2009/03/marker-and-yellow-partner-to-bring-ie-8-first-in-new-zealand/feed/ 1