Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

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Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

posted @ Wednesday, November 11, 2009 4:15 AM | 12 Comments

Two SDK libraries have released this week, helping developers integrate Silverlight experiences into their applications.

Bing Maps Silverlight Control

At TechEd Europe, the Bing Maps team released version 1.0 of the official Bing Maps Silverlight Control! This is a replacement for the previous Virtual Earth Javascript control and provides a great DeepZoom experience for using the mapping platform. Here’s some of the great features for Silverlight developers:

Built on Silverlight 3!
Designer support for Expression Blend
Support for out-of-browser
Vector in Pushpin class
Data binding – much needed and welcomed
UI enhancements (animations for simple features)
Embeddable maps

Great release, and a great addition to any Silverlight developer’s toolbox.

Bing Maps in Silverlight using Layer shapes

Download the SDK here: Bing Maps Silverlight Control SDK and check out the interactive SDK.

Facebook .NET SDK

An updated (actually 3.0) release of the Facebook .NET SDK was also released. Are you a .NET developer writing Facebook applications or desiring to integrate the social network into your applications? Check out the Facebook .NET SDK which provides:

Silverlight-compatible assembly for handling all the logic to communicate with Facebook platform and has specific support for XAML data binding.
Web API for Facebook IFrame/FBML applications
Using ASP.NET MVC? There’s an assembly to support that model as well

The Facebook .NET SDK encapsulates the interaction with the developer platform for Facebook and should help .NET developers in web or client get started in a familiar way with Facebook. I’m excited to see what folks might do with Silverlight and Facebook!

Download the Facebook .NET SDK here and get links to getting started with the Facebook API.

tags: silverlight, facebook, bing, bing maps, maps, virtual earth, ve, virtualearth, ria, xaml, riaservices

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution By license.

Comments

blackLabrador

11/11/2009 5:36 AM | # re: Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

Thanks Tim ! For those like me who were familiar with the CTP release of Virtual Earth you can find some of the main changes there : msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee681889.aspx. It took me an hour to upgrade everything on my website. Will try the Facebook API... Do you have any exemples for this one ?
Thanks
melvs jose

11/11/2009 7:39 AM | # re: Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

I was glad to read this post... I have some experiences in using ASP.Net though i'm no yet very familiar with Silverlight but i'm actually interested of utilizing it on web application... Also i'm a user of facebook and this post makes me want to experience an application using Silverlight in facebook...
Jason M. Hirst

11/11/2009 9:17 AM | # re: Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

I'm somewhat confused by the Facebook SDK.

Does this mean that us developers can create our own Client apps that integrate Facebook data, or can we create applications (using Silverlight and .Net) that can be published via Facebook (currently the majority of the apps/games, etc are Flash based)
Ben Hayat

11/11/2009 9:55 AM | # re: Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

Tim, can you please clarify these two blow statements, which seems a bit contradictory.

"Facebook.dll: This is the main assembly that will be used by all applications."

"Facebook.Silverlight.dll: This is the Silverlight version of the main assembly that will be used by all Silverlight applications."

If one is doing SL, does he still need the Facebook.dll? Because in the second statement it says "This is the Silverlight version of the main assembly" which gets confusing with the first statement " This is the main assembly that will be used by all applications". Do you see the overlap?

Thanks!
..Ben
timheuer

11/11/2009 10:10 AM | # re: Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

Ben -- I read that as an overlap as well and asked, but haven't had the chance to validate (which I should have). I think the main assembly is a server proxy of sorts perhaps.
sl.ayer

11/11/2009 11:02 AM | # re: Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

For silverlight applications you just need Facebook.Silverlight.dll. One issue I have with the way toolkit is built is the size of silverlight version of dll, at 450k it is a very heavy addition to most silverlight apps. My facebook app more then doubled in size after compiling with facebook toolkit.
Btw *cough* the app I built using facebook sdk: http://apps.facebook.com/comiccomposer
Ben Hayat

11/11/2009 12:54 PM | # re: Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

SL.Ayer, this is fantastic showing SL app working in FB. Thanks for your post!

..Ben
scommisso

11/11/2009 2:45 PM | # re: Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

Nice, I had been doing Facebook integration from SL through the HTML bridge. Nice to bring this in natively.

On a side note, do you know what's up with that ComponentArt Silverlight competition? They didn't release the top 5 last week and didn't release the winners yesterday. No response to e-mails. Figured I'd ask you since you're a judge. :)
www.componentart.com/community/competition2009/
Omer

11/11/2009 10:45 PM | # re: Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

Bing Maps Controls is a great addition. I have been using the CTP version and really glad to have Version 1.
Jurrian de Valk

11/16/2009 2:34 PM | # re: Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

On Facebook, think of Facebook like "The Platform" just as Windows API is a platform. If you want to get information, such as what diskdrives you have, you call a Windows API function.

It is the same with Facebook. If you want information about who your friends are and what they had for breakfast, you call a Facebook API.

Since there is a lot of plumbing and XML involved, the Facebook SDK parses and beats all this stuff into something you can easily use from Silverlight, ASP.NET and MVC.

You can build your own applications in ASP.NET and integrate them completely with facebook (Using FBML tags, instead of HTML, its just the same)
So yes you can write app quizes and such in ASP.NET like "Which hairy friend suits you best?"

In addition you can host your Silverlight Application then on these ASP.NET pages. And from Silverlight you can then also integrate with Facebook (such as "GiveMeAllFriendsThatIThinkAreNice())

Hope this clarifies it a bit. I did some work with the previous Facebook SDK and it was a bit of a pain, not to mention Facebook kept changing the API so I had to recompile / update / check my app continuously :-)

Hope this new SDK makes this better and offers some better abstraction.
Investing In Residential Propert

11/17/2009 10:12 PM | # Investing In Residential Propert

I tried refreshing the page, searching for Face book on Bing instead of the very top search bar and I tried shutting down my computer and starting over. The symbols on the screen are called Unicode,I think. I get emails saying I'm getting replies on my Wall but I go to click on the link and it doesn't open. I also get this message that the computer is trying to download the page and it never does.
Deepika

1/28/2010 6:28 AM | # re: Two Silverlight SDKs released – Bing and Facebook

We can build applications in facebook no doubt, but how to integrate it in my webpage...
As in i need to add logins to more than one networking sites eg google,myspace,facebook to my site...
The user should be able to login to all these sites from my site...
Will be using open social apis for the same...
bt am not finding much help...

Please help