First look at Silverlight Facebook SDK

November 16, 2009 | by Maciej Greń

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A few days ago (6th of November) the third version of .Net SDK for Facebook was released. This release has major new features like Silverlight and ASP.MVC support. What this means to Silverlight community?  Below you will find my first impressions and remarks.

API for Silverlight enables quite big set of nice functionalities

Generally, to be able use Silverlight Facebook API you have to use the API class which has several different properties for Friends, Comments etc. Each property has its own methods to fetch the data asynchronously. Below you will find the list of all properties available from Facebook Silverlight API.

  • Admin, Application, Auth
  • Comments, Connect
  • Data
  • Events
  • Fbml, Feed, Fql, Friends
  • Groups
  • Intl
  • Links, LiveMessage, LoginUrl, LogOffUrl
  • Marketplace, Message
  • Notes, Notifications
  • Pages, Photos, Profile
  • Status
  • Users
  • Video

As you can see, the list is quite long. It gives us quite powerful features. It is even tempting to build your own Facebook client that will be more friendly in use than regular one and this way – take the traffic to your Silverlight client. I am curious, how this can grow…

Hidden potential covered by lack of examples

I had only one hour to check out the samples provided by the Facebook SDK team. I checked the Samples directory, looking for fancy and robust solutions using Silverlight. Instead I  found three rather simple examples in form of prof-of-concept. The first example (GettingStarted) was presenting how to connect to Facebook and download information about user albums. Unfortunately I could not check it because after connecting to Facebook I didn’t notice any change in my Silverlight application. Second example (SilverlightOutOfBrowser) was presenting Out of Browser experience. Again, I could not check it because to do this properly I need an installed IIS to run it properly. I am installing IIS on Windows 7 now, and I will check it later.  I know that community should build something upon the framework but without having at least one good Silverlight example it is hard to decide if this library is worth the effort.

API class is not mockable which makes the whole thing less TDD proof

Unfortunately, the current version of the API is not built in the way enabling easy mockuping and furthermore – testing. This issue was already reported by the community. I wonder how this request will be treated by the SDK team.

Opinions are divided – some say this API rocks, others – that it is brings frustration

After reading recent reviews I can only state one thing. It is too early to judge  if this library will be helpful for others or not. Some people find it very useful already. Others claim that the current 3.0 version frustrate them and that 2.1 version (previous one) is much more promising. In my opinion I had not sufficient time to make accurate judgement. Unfortunately, after around 30 minutes of strugle I managed to launch one of three of the sample apps.  Lets wait for the community. I believe that this SDK has big potential. I hope that it will not vanish because of poor samples and documentation (as well in the code).

I am curious about your experiences. Feel invited to discuss by commenting this post below!

  • Joe
    My reaction to the new sdk for face book, is it is extremely frustrating. It took about a week just to get the sample in the sdk working(the sample uses the old silverlight control, it's not even an SL 3.0 example!). I got the sample working finally, but my main frustration is I can't find an example of how to use FQL is Silverlight. Are you sure it's part of the Silverlight.facebook.dll. I'm not so sure you can do fql in Silverlight which would make it extremely limited, because the built in functions aren't good enough for what I need. Any exmaples of doin FQL in Silverlight?
  • Joe
    Ok, it looks like you can do FQL in Silverlight using the Facebook.Rest API class. However Facebook has really limited what you can pull back using FQL.

    I do like that Facebook keeps users privacy(I myself very much like the facebook privacy settings), but I don't understand why we can't write FQL to bring back the same data that users share openly to the public on facebook. This makes what I can develop kind of limited. For instance, if I can see who a user is friends with on facebook without being their friend, then you would think you could write sql to say show me all of a user's friends(which should only show people who allow this, and only have access to what that share publicly, but it doesn't allow).
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