Microsoft is offering an open source software development kit linking the company's Bing search engine to Apple's iPhone and Mac systems, according to a Bing community blog post on Thursday.

The SDK enables querying of Bing from within Cocoa or Cocoa Touch applications. Cocoa features Apple's frameworks, APIs, and runtimes for Mac OS X development. A Microsoft representative earlier this month had pledged that stronger linkage between Bing and the iPhone would be forthcoming shortly.

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"The SDK was designed to remove the headache of manually having to parse XML or JSON in order to communicate with the Bing API," according to the description of the SDK on the Microsoft CodePlex Web site.

Also with the SDK, synchronous and asynchronous queries can be performed and Bing searches made for Web, image, video, news, and phone book results.

The SDK is available under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).