Redmond, Washington — While there have been a number of .NET libraries for the Facebook Platform for some time now, Microsoft on Monday officially unveiled its latest software development kit for Facebook that empowers developers to create Facebook applications for Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation.
The two companies’ latest venture incorporated Web, client, and social technologies for building apps and services for the social networking site. While there are a number of significant gains to this upgrade including the ability to easily view indigenous Facebook Platform methods within the Microsoft Development environment with intellisense. As Microsoft previously displayed applications build using the Facebook library within Microsoft applications, this is the first official rollout of the libraries.
A screenshot showing off the NewsFeed control for WPF. (Credit: The Silverlight Team Blog)
Accessible for free, the Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform is designed to empowers developers with a way to quickly incorporate Web, client, and social technologies and easily take advantage of the various features of the Facebook Platform through the Facebook Stream API with a range of samples, controls and templates, according to a Monday posting on the Microsoft Silverlight blog.
“No matter what your application flavor is, the Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform supports the development of applications across Silverlight, WPF, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, and Windows Forms, enabling easy consumption of Facebook services delivered through the Facebook Open Stream API,” the blog post states.
If you fall in to a .NET category of developers and want to learn more, you can go check out the official Microsoft Facebook SDK page.
There are presently other libraries accessible that enable Facebook developers to create in combination with other technologies, such as JavaScript, PHP, ActionScript, and the iPhone. There are a variety of others as well, which can be seen here, but these are the ones that Facebook officially provides support for.
If you are interested in giving it a try, the new SDK is available now at www.microsoft.com/facebooksdk.
Microsoft has been working to offer developers with an alternative to quickly and efficiently build Facebook applications across the breadth of their portfolio, ranging from Visual Studio to Zune, Xbox Live, Windows Messenger and Live Search.
The developer toolkit and SDK is available on Microsoft’s CodePlex Open Source community.