UWP Tip #23 - Windows Community Toolkit - Microsoft Translator and Bing Services

Welcome back to another UWP Tip focusing on the Windows Community Toolkit.

Services Intro

The Windows Community Toolkit contains a growing collection of services that provide easy access to services from Microsoft and other sources. These are the services available to developers in version 4.0 of the toolkit.

• Facebook - Login, get data from a user's feed, photos, and more.
• LinkedIn - Login, get user profile information, share a post to a user's feed.
• Twitter - Receive tweets, search Twitter, post a new tweet, and more.
• Bing - Search Bing
• OneDrive - Login and get file and folder info, manipulate files and more.
• Microsoft Translator - Translate text between languages supported by the service.
• Microsoft Graph Service - Login, send messages, get user info from Azure AD, get user events and more.

This post will illustrate how to use the Bing and Microsoft Translator services with some simple examples. The examples wrap the two services in our own application service class which could be used by a UWP app or other Windows application.

Microsoft Translator Service

To use the Translator service, an application key for the service is necessary. Developers can register for a key here.

The TranslateTextAsync async method will take three parameters:

• sourceLanguage
• destinationLanguage
• sourceText

The source and destination languages are passed to the translate method in the form of 'friendly names' of each language. To the the entire list of these names, use the service method TranslatorService.Instance.GetLanguageNamesAsync(). Another option is to attempt detection of the source language with the method TranslatorService.Instance.DetectLanguageAsync(string).

Here is the complete code for our method.

private const string MyTranslatorKey = "<your key here>";
 
public async Task<string> TranslateTextAsync(string sourceLanguage, string destinationLanguage, string sourceText)
{
     await TranslatorService.Instance.InitializeAsync(MyTranslatorKey);
     // Translates the source text to from the specified source language to the destination language.
     return await TranslatorService.Instance.TranslateAsync(sourceText, sourceLanguage, destinationLanguage);
}

Bing Service

NOTE: The Bing service has been marked as obsolete as of Windows Community Toolkit 4.0. The team recommends using the Cognitive Services SDK moving forward. That SDK can be found here on GitHub.

The Bing API requires an API key, which can be obtained here. There is a free trial account available. Sign up, select the free options, and get access to up to 5000 queries per month from your applications. Our SearchAsync(string, int) method will create a searchConfig object which will tell the service to search from the U.S. using English language and perform a standard search. A News search type is also available. The method will then perform the search and return the number of BingResult record types specified by the numberofResults parameter.

public async Task<List<BingResult>> SearchAsync(string searchText, int numberOfResults)
{
     if (string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(searchText))
     {
         return null;
     }
     var searchConfig = new BingSearchConfig
     {
         Country = BingCountry.UnitedStates,
         Language = BingLanguage.English,
         Query = searchText,
         QueryType = BingQueryType.Search 
    };
     return await BingService.Instance.RequestAsync(searchConfig, numberOfResults);
}

Easy-peasy, right? After the next major release of the Windows Community Toolkit, we will examine how to perform the same types of queries with the Cognitive Services SDK.

Wrap-Up

These are a couple of easy-to-consume services that developers can use today in their applications by simply adding the required Windows Community Toolkit NuGet packages. To check out the complete docs for the available services, visit Microsoft Docs.

Happy coding!

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