Facebook SDK for .NET Released -- Visual Studio Magazine

Onward and UpwardKeith Ward, Editor in Chief, Visual Studio Magazine

Facebook SDK for .NET Released

Facebook today released the Facebook SDK for .NET, to enable Windows-focused developers to integrate their applications with Facebook.

The SDK was announced on the Windows Phone Developer Blog. The open-source SDK is C#/XAML based, and can be found at the Outercurve Web site. Most developers will want to install the SDK using NuGet (this page recommends having the latest version of NuGet; some features of the SDK won't work with older versions.)

Before you do any of that, however, you'll need to create a Facebook app. Once that's done, you can build any type Windows Phone 8 or Windows 8 app. Since the provided APIs for both Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 are "very similar", reports Microsoft, code sharing between the platforms should be simple.

The two critical reasons to develop suing the Facebook SDK for .NET are spelled out in the Windows Phone Developer blog:

It takes away all of the complexity of logging on with Facebook. Based on the provided samples, all you need to do is use a bit of boilerplate code, add your Facebook app ID to the mix, and voila! You can have people logging on to your app with Facebook.
It allows you to focus on your Facebook-related scenarios by abstracting away the low-level details such as HTTP connections and query parameters. This way you can plan and develop around Open Graph APIs and objects, which is where you want to spend your development resources.

The SDK is supported as far back as .NET 3.5. Also supported is Silverlight 5 and Windows Phone 7.1, so you don't have to be building only for Windows 8/Windows Phone 8.

Outercurve is a foundation dedicated to bridging the gap between software companies and the open-source community by "providing software IP management and project development governance," according to the organization.

Posted by Keith Ward on 04/18/2013

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