Surviving the Facebook app ‘swamp’ with Azure

“Developing with Facebook is like building a house on a swamp,” says Microsoft’s Nathan Totten. He should know. He used to work at social media company Thuzi, and when the company needed to write a C# Facebook application, he and his colleague Jim Zimmerman were so disappointed by the existing C# SDKs that they built their own.

Totten is now a technical evangelist at Microsoft, and his project has become the open source Facebook C# SDK with a measure of approval from Microsoft as the suggested way to build C# applications for Facebook.

So why is Facebook development swamp-like? The first problem is that the Facebook API changes over time, and any wrapper you build on top can soon get out of date. The second problem is that Facebook does not officially support C#. It has SDKs for JavaScript, Apple iOS, Android and PHP.

In mitigation, the dynamic features of C# 4.0 are actually well-suited to APIs that are in flux, as Totten explains in his post mentioned above. Some API changes and additions can be accommodated without changing the SDK at all. This has also made it possible to make the C# SDK somewhat similar to the PHP SDK, which is an advantage when you are consulting the Facebook documentation. Read more...