While there have been a number of .NET libraries for the Facebook Platform for some time now, today Microsoft is releasing the official Microsoft SDK for Facebook Platform. There are a number of core benefits to this upgrade including the ability to easily view native Facebook Platform methods within the Microsoft Development environment with intellisense. While Microsoft previously demoed applications build using the Facebook library within Microsoft applications, this is the first official rollout of the libraries.

Personally I’m not a big fan of .NET development but I know many organizations that run only on .NET technologies. There’s no doubt that the new libraries being provided by Microsoft will make it much easier to quickly integrate Facebook features into applications. Honestly there isn’t much you can say about these new libraries except that they’ll be extremely useful for developers. According to Microsoft, here are the core components of this new SDK:

• Facebook.dll: This is the main assembly that will be used by all applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications (Silverlight and WPF) to enhance the Facebook platform to make databinding and data caching easier.
• Facebook.Silverlight.dll: This is the Silverlight version of the main assembly that will be used by all Silverlight applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications to enhance the Facebook platform to make databinding and data caching easier. The REST API in this assembly is Asynchronous only.
  Facebook.Web.dll: This assembly should be used by Canvas applications. The main functionality supported in this assembly is to encapsulate the handshake between the Facebook application and a canvas application (both FBML and IFrame)
• Facebook.Web.Mvc.dll: Provide a support building canvas applications using ASP.NET MVC. Separated from Facebook.Web.dll to avoid all developers from needing to install the MVC bits.
  Facebook.Winforms.dll: This assembly provides support for writing Facebook applications using Winform technology. This provides a Component that wraps the API to make it easier to use from Winforms. This also contains some user controls to help display Facebook data easily.

If you happen to be a .NET developer and want to learn more, you can go check out the official Microsoft Facebook SDK page.