LINQ to Bing Search Results



LINQ offers versatile querying capabilities within the .NET Framework (v3.0+), offering a straightforward method for programmatic data access through CData ADO.NET Data Providers. In this article, we demonstrate the use of LINQ to retrieve information from the Bing Search Data Provider.

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the Bing Search via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Bing Search. To achieve this, we will use LINQ to Entity Framework, which facilitates the generation of connections and can be seamlessly employed with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data through LINQ.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

  1. In a new project in Visual Studio, right-click on the project and choose to add a new item. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
  2. Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
  3. Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData Bing Search Data Source".
  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    To connect to Bing, set the ApiKey connection property. To obtain the API key, sign into Microsoft Cognitive Services and register for the Bing Search APIs.

    Two API keys are then generated; select either one.

    When querying tables, the SearchTerms parameter must be supplied in the WHERE clause.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    APIKey=MyAPIKey;
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting BingEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
  6. Enter a model name and select any tables or views you would like to include in the model.

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select commands. For example:

BingEntities context = new BingEntities(); var videosearchQuery = from videosearch in context.VideoSearch select videosearch; foreach (var result in videosearchQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.Title); }

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.

Ready to get started?

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Bing Search Icon Bing Search ADO.NET Provider

Easy-to-use Bing search client enables .NET-based applications to easily search Microsoft Bing and filter search results.