Break from Blogging

Well, it appears that not blogging lately has an obvious effect on number of subscribers.  I have not blogged in about a month due to baby, work, and other things going on in my life…such as dealing with the Facebook API.  If you have not tried to use that API in .NET outside a Facebook canvas it’s quite frustrating due to the poor and confusing documentation which is biased to forcing users to use FQL (their proprietary SQL or whatever), php, and FBML (their proprietary version of HTML…yea, weird).

But, I’ve resurfaced now since I’ve gotten a framework I created around Facebook to work and will be posting again soon about actually…you got it, Facebook API with .NET.  I’ll start by better explaining the overall API parts (top level) and give sort of a tour. 

Their documentation seems swell when you first start looking at it but if you get into it, you find yourself spending a good week just going through it finding out it’s horrible and very, very lacking in sufficient details and scattered/unorganized which makes your head spin.  Their forums also back up the lousy documentation with constant bitching from like developers trying to use the API.  They say they are going to improve it due to all the bitching by developers who are consuming the API, so we’ll see.  Just take a look at some posts in the forums to get a good sense of the frustration out there.

So I hope to help contribute by clearing up several ?s that come up with that API shortly.

First I’ll be fixing the CSS behind this blog as it’s not working well in IE and as you can see Live Writer has also caused me some pains as some posts have gone a bit haywire for some reason interms of the formatting.  Something’s up with Live Writer.  What you see is not what you get.

The next posts coming up:

> Facebook API Primer

> Implementing Facebook in .NET

And I’m debating whether to start a Facebook API Forum due to the lack of .NET support in their documentation and existing forum from Facebook.  There are 2 APIs on CodePlex that you “could” use.  But, you might want tighter control rather than use a canned API like this.  That’s why I ended up creating some classes of my own to serve as a wrapper to the Facebook API that encapsulated only some of the parts we needed from that API. 

The APIs on Facebook for .NET are HUGE.  Not sure if you really need all that.  Also, I would not use the Facebook DeveloperToolkit API soley based on the consulting firm that created it.  You will most likely have performance issues with this one and very long sloppy methods.  Personally, I would not touch any code they create period whether it’s that API or any other..word of advice based on some past experience dealing with them.  If you are to go with a 3rd party API, I do not suggest the Facebook Developer Toolkit, but rather the Facebook.NET API created by a Microsoft employee Nikhil Kothar.  Or just role your own only for the parts you need, for greater control and less debugging.

Until then, I hope you are having good luck with the economy and hopefully still working.  I wish all the best during this horrible economy.