Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Microsoft Cognitive Services  is a collection of the following APIs: Academic Knowledge API  helps to interpret user queries for academic intent and retrieve rich information from the Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG). The MAG knowledge base is a web-scale heterogeneous entity graph comprised of entities that model scholarly activities: field of study, author, institution, paper, venue, and event. The MAG data is mined from the Bing web index as well as an in-house knowledge base from Bing. Bing Autosuggest API lets partners send a partial search query to Bing and get back a list of suggested queries that other users have searched on  Bing Image Search API provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/Images  Bing News Search API provides a similar (but not exact) experience to Bing.com/News  Bing Speech API is a cloud-based API that provides advanced algorithms to process spoken language. With this API, developers can add speech driven actions to...

This Week I Learned - * A web page I built with StupidTable jQuery plugin to sort a table was about three times lighter than the more feature-rich  DataTables jQuery plugin *  Nice code sample of an Azure Function that uses a blob trigger, sends the uploaded object to be analysed by Cortana Intelligence and stores the results in a DocumentDB collection. *  It is possible to get data (from a relational database) into and out of a Google Sheet programmatically *  Windows App Studio  which makes is easy to build a Windows Phone app without coding now provides a REST API Data Source feature that allows users to integrate apps with third party APIs. * Power BI is an evolution of the add-ins previously available in Excel: Power Pivot, Power Query, and Power View. You can use Power BI with or without Excel—you no longer are dependent on the version of Microsoft Office installed at your company. Power BI is not just a tool: it is an ecosystem that...

Images make content more interesting. There are many websites that offer free photos and images under liberal licensing terms. There are also many web services that can generate & manipulate images on the fly by altering values within their URLs - * Placeholder images - useful for web developers & designers when they don't have actual images yet. This link has a bunch of such image generation services which can create images of specified dimensions with color or celebrities or kittens  in them. Right click on the image, choose the option to open it in a new tab from the context menu & inspect how the URL is constructed * Google Chart API can generate dynamic Icons, Bubbles, Pins, Fun Style Notes, Weather Forecast Notes, Outlined Font Text Blocks, Contextual Icons, Flags & miscellaneous images of short sizes. You just have to specify some querystring parameters within the URL to get different types of images. * Update on 4/Sep/2015 - This f...

WordPress , Tumblr , Blogger allow you to publish blog posts by email. This extensible feature makes it possible to post even programmatically. Considering you can send emails programmatically , content can be posted through custom web interfaces or scripts without writing complicated code. I tweaked my  World Citizen News app to curate pictures on Flickr related to India & publish them to the my Bharat Darshan Tumblr blog I changed the layout of the default Tumblr template in the Settings to Grid to get the Pinterest style look. [Update - 21/Oct/2015]: Tumblr now lets you prefix a tag word with a pound-sign (“#”) in your message, and it will be removed from the text and set as a tag for the post . Sometimes email programs append text to the bottom of each sent message; to make sure this cruft doesn't get posted to your blog, put #end at the end of your Blogger post This interesting article on Digital Inspiration lists services which accept submissions via email...

When you are out to buy a technical book either online or at a bookshop by spending a considerable amount, it helps to check beforehand which are the best selling books on that topic and how well they compare with the others. A fair indicator of the popularity of the book is the Amazon Sales Rank and also their customer reviews and rankings. Philip Miseldine 's article shows how you can consume Amazon's E-Commerce Service(ECS) to build your own web application that gets a snapshot of all the vital details using Visual Web Developer 2005 Express or even Visual Studio .NET 2003.

Key points from the article " Top 5 Web Service Mistakes " paraphrased - For maximum interoperability of .NET Web Services with non .NET clients, use standard XML Schema base types instead of .NET specific types. Web services developed in .NET are deployed in ASP.NET and so they have access to all of the same great features of any ASP.Net web application like Output caching, application data caching, SessionState persistence (including out-of-process State Server and SQL Server) and client cookies. Significant performance benefits can be achieved by leveraging these state persistence features (with some caveats, however) Consider aggregating smaller requests into a larger single request to improve performance while suitably handling the increased complexity. Use web services to expose functionality and not data. For example, Google Search Web Service's usefulness is in its ability to give organized and relevant results rather than plain data. Secure the data exchange and...

Mashups are applications that integrate APIs and data from at least two or more vendors. [ Chandu Thota ] Housing Maps is a Mashup. This application involves Google Maps API and Craig's list data .

Neil Kandalgaonkar makes good use of the Google Search API ... " Spolsky released the chapter listing of [ Best Software Writing I ] in June 2005, and I noticed that a lot of them were blog posts that I'd read before. I wondered how much of the book was taken from online content. A few minutes of hacking later, and a programmed equivalent of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" had found most every single chapter, or a page that was one degree of separation away. " Nominations for Volume 2 of the compilation are listed on the discussion group of JoelOnSoftware

With many popular websites offering their services to be extended programmatically, this is a good time for Web developers and hobbyists. Here is a list of such APIs: Technorati Google eBay Yahoo FedEx Flickr BBC EVDB Backpack Amazon The MSN Messenger Activity API is one of the many MSN API's that gives you innovative tools to build applications that integrate with MSN Messenger. There is now also a contest to build the best app on MSN Messenger . Update: The website ProgrammableWeb has a great deal of information on mashups and the new Web 2.0 APIs.