This SDK provides a light wrapper around the Facebook Graph and Old Rest APIs with both sync and async calls. Additionally it contains a set of useful canvas utilities to sustain authentication/authorization workflows.

Forked from http://github.com/facebook/csharp-sdk.

NOTE: If you encounter any issues, please file them here.

The easiest way to get started is to have Visual Studio. You can get a free copy of Visual C# 2010 Express Edition from Microsoft.

The instructions that follow will assume that are you using this version. The steps are very similar for other versions.

Once you have installed it and downloaded the source of the SDK, you will need to build the library. Open FacebookAPI.sln. Right click on FacebookAPI in the Solution Explorer and choose Build. This shouldn't take very long. The SDK is ready to use. You can either build on top of this project, or use the DLL directly in another project.

There is a sample web app included. See the FacebookAPI.WebUI project in the solution. Right click on the project and choose Set as a StartUP Project. Now build the project, and run it. You will be taken through authentication/authorization process on Facebook. If you ok that, the application shows your public profile information gathered with sync and **async methods using application's and your access tokens.

Most data accessible via the Graph API and the Old Rest API required an access token. This SDK includes a set of helpful methods of getting a token from users - see CanvasAuthUtil and AuthenticationModule implementations. Yet the best method will depend on what type of application is using it. A desktop application might show a popup browser window that loads the Facebook site, for example. You can read more about obtaining an access token in the authentication guide.

First you instantiate an API object (passing in the token):

Facebook.FacebookApi api = new Facebook.FacebookAPI(token);

If you pass in null then you will only be able to access public data.

If you use the authentication primitives (CanvasAuthContext, OAuthContext, IAuthContext), it may look like:

var identity = (Identity)Context.User.Identity;
Facebook.FacebookApi api = identity.AuthContext.ApiClient;

Then you make calls like:

JsonObject result = api.Get("/userid"); // or api.Get("userId")

To call an Old Rest Api method use:

JsonObject result = api.Get("/method/friends.getAppUsers");

Actually the request will go to the https:/api.facebook.com/method/friends.getAppUsers. So when a relative path starts with /method/ or just method/ it is a clue to the wrapper to use the Old Rest api.

The same with async methods:

JsonObject result = null;
api.BeginGet("/userid", ar => result = api.EndGet(ar), null);

The JsonObject class provides a wrapper around JSON that allows for automatic type conversion. In particular, it can treat JSON as a Dictionary, Array, String, Integer, Boolean or DateTime. So to get the name of the userid as a string you would do:

string name = result.Dictionary["name"].String;

The SDK also supports POST and DELETE requests, for writing data. For example to delete a comment once you have gotten its id you could do:

api.Delete("/comment_id");

More useful is to use it with the async method as it doesn't block execution:

api.BeginDelete("/comment_id", null, null);

To write a post on a user's wall you could do:

var postArgs = new Dictionary<string, string> {
    { "message", "Hello, world!" }
};
api.BeginPost("/userid/feed", postArgs, null, null);

More information on the API itself can be found in the developer documentation.

Any errors in making Graph API calls cause a FacebookAPIException or a TimeoutException to be thrown.