Use Facebook with Silverlight, Popfly, and Visual Studio

Posted By: Joshua Allen | May 25th, 2007 @ 1:40 AM

Less than 30 days ago, we showed you Silverlight and made some promises about the possibilities it would unleash. Two weeks later, we showed you Popfly (built on Silverlight), and today even more pieces fall into place.

At Facebook's "F8" platform launch in San Francisco, we announced a partnership with Facebook to enable Facebook's social networking "graph" to be leverages with all the web-centric technologies we offer. Mike Arrington and Fortune Magazine both explain why the Facebook platform is such a big deal.

Facebook is showing off more than 70 companies already building on the social graph, and with the stuff we announced tonight the number of people who can leverage Facebook's platform grows by an order of magnitude:

People using Popfly can now drag-drop to create in-browser mashups that use Facebook friends, photos, and events. Since it's using Popfly, the Facebook mashups can also include existing Popfly blocks, for example mashing up your Facebook friends list with XBox 360 gamer tags.

And for developers, we've created a Facebook developer's toolkit to enable you to code against Facebook with any of our programming languages. The toolkit includes components, controls, and samples for both web development and client development. Especially check out the fully-functional sample using WPF and LINQ to make a 3D rolodex.

You can download the toolkit and Visual Studio Express both for free starting now.

The event is just now wrapping up. We will be running videos and demos from the event soon. In the meantime, you can look at photos from the event. And don't forget to download the toolkit and make some cool mashups. I can't wait to see what sorts of things people build!