Resources for Writing Facebook Applications with .NET

If  you doing any reading on the web you will have heard about Facebook, you may even have a Facebook account.  I have one which I created a few months ago trying to see what the hype is all about.  Honestly, I don’t see it but I am trying to understand it and find some value in it.  Maybe I am the wrong demographic (40 year old male) and I am starting to not understand the new-fangled Internet gadgets, but I sure hope not.

I do understand Facebook is popular and tons of people use it, so I don’t actually have to get-it to be part of it and take advantage of the opportunity. 

I have a few ideas for Facebook applications I think would be useful to users on Facebook so I started searching around the Internet for some information on what’s available to .NET developers who wish to create Facebook applications.  The Facebook development platform is relatively new and most developers are not using .NET to create them, but there are some resources I found valuable in my search.

• Facebook Developers site – this is probably the best place to start as it is where you get the information from Facebook itself.  They offer a great wiki as well as a complete API reference.
• Microsoft Facebook Developers Toolkit – the “official” toolkit for developing both Windows Forms and ASP.NET Facebook applications.  The latest release is 1.2 and is from July, the source tree shows many updates since July.  It has been reported 1.2 has many bugs, so getting source and attempting to build it is probably the best bet on this one.   Microsoft has also created some documentation which is available to download.
• Facebook.NET – developed by Nikhil Kothari.  This one seems to be the easiest to use as of the time of this writing.  Nikhil provides a decent overview of the toolkit on his blog.  A Visual Studio starter kit has been developed to be use with this toolkit as well.
• Facebook Platform Client for .NET – this one is pretty new but active development seems to be going on with it.  I plan to check this one out as well and give it a good shake down.
• AjaxNinja blog – I found this resource to someone who is creating Facebook applications in .NET.  He has some good posts related to some of the tools I have found and has some good pointers to creating applications as well.

I am will document my journey with these tools and how creating my first Facebook application goes.  If anyone has other resources like this please add them to the comments and I will update my resource list for later publishing.