Visual Studio® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Writing Custom Facebook Applications

In This Chapter

• Developing applications in Facebook

• Writing your custom application code

• Executing your first Facebook application

Starting out as a networking site for Harvard University students, Facebook has exploded into a social media phenomenon that has swept nearly the entire world. Besides being a social networking site, Facebook has become a development platform for application developers. You can develop Facebook applications using several programming languages, such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Python, C#, and Visual Basic. Your application can be either a desktop application or a Web application. In this chapter, you find out how to develop an ASP.NET web application for Facebook.

Creating and Registering Your Application with Facebook

Facebook (www.facebook.com) is a social media networking site launched in 2006 that allows anyone over the age of 13 with a valid e-mail address to create an account. At the time of this writing, Facebook had approximately 400 million users, a number that is growing rapidly.

After you have an account on Facebook, you can join any number of networks created according to geographical location, workplace, church affiliation, high school or college, and so on. Once on Facebook, you can search for classmates, coworkers, colleagues, or any other person you want to keep in touch with. To connect with another user, you simply ask that person to be your friend; if he accepts, you're now connected. ...