Helping the user with auto suggestions

Auto suggestions are a great way to enhance the user experience. The typical use case is where, whenever a user enters some text into a text field, a list of suggested words is displayed.

Note

If you have not already done so, sign up for the Bing Autosuggest API at https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/bing-autosuggest-api.

Adding Autosuggest to the user interface

As textboxes in WPF do not contain any auto-suggestion features, we need to add some on our own. We are going to use a third-party package, so install the WPFTextBoxAutoComplete package through the NuGet package manager, in our example project.

In the MainView.xaml file, add the following attribute to the starting Window tag:

    xmlns:behaviors="clr-namespace: WPFTextBoxAutoComplete; assembly=WPFTextBoxAutoComplete" 

We will also need to make sure that the TextBox binding for our search query updates whenever the user enters data. This can be done by...