Creating Facebook Applications in WPF, Silverlight, WinForms, and ASP.NET with Facebook SDK 3.0

Posted by Abel Avram on Nov 10, 2009

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Development,

Enterprise Architecture

Topics

Silverlight ,

Web 2.0 ,

.NET ,

Tools

Tags

ASP.NET MVC ,

WinForms ,

Microsoft ,

WPF ,

ASP.NET ,

Facebook

Clarity Consulting Inc. and Microsoft have released Facebook SDK 3.0, a toolkit allowing developers to write WPF, Silverlight, WinForms or ASP.NET applications integrated with Facebook.

Facebook SDK helps writing both Canvas and Facebook Connect type of applications on all major .NET platforms. The toolkit contains the following assemblies:

• Facebook.dll: This is the main assembly that will be used by all applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications (Silverlight and WPF) to enhance the Facebook platform to make data binding and data caching easier.
• Facebook.Silverlight.dll: This is the Silverlight version of the main assembly that will be used by all Silverlight applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications to enhance the Facebook platform to make data binding and data caching easier. The REST API in this assembly is Asynchronous only.
• Facebook.Web.dll: This assembly should be used by Canvas applications. The main functionality supported in this assembly is to encapsulate the handshake between the Facebook application and a canvas application (both FBML and IFrame)
• Facebook.Web.Mvc.dll: Provide a support building canvas applications using ASP.NET MVC. Separated from Facebook.Web.dll to avoid all developers from needing to install the MVC bits.
• Facebook.Winforms.dll: This assembly provides support for writing Facebook applications using Winform technology. This provides a Component that wraps the API to make it easier to use from Winforms. This also contains some user controls to help display Facebook data easily.

This release removes some architectural inconsistencies introduced in earlier versions and makes use of an asynchronous interface to connect to Facebook. Other enhancements are:

• Support for Silverlight and ASP.NET MVC
• Better support for WPF and FBML (Facebook Meta-Language used to create Canvas applications)
• Login control replacing BasePage and/or MasterPage for Canvas Development
• Source code refactoring
• More complete help documentation and samples

The refactoring of the source code done to align it with Microsoft’s guidelines has introduced some breaking changes.

Facebook SDK currently is a CodePlex project under MS-PL 1.1 license and includes the source code, samples and documentation.

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