Microsoft recently released an updated version of their Facebook SDK for .NET developers. This is the result of a joint partnership between Clarity Consulting and the Concept Development Team at Microsoft.

According to Microsoft "the goal is to enable .NET developers to quickly and easily leverage the various features of the Facebook Platform." The software giant has provided samples and tools for helping develop Facebook applications in the various .NET platforms including: ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF and WinForms. Microsoft has also release the source code for the API, components, controls, and samples."

The main goals driving the release of version 3.0 are:

• Provide better doc and samples
• Provide support for Silverlight
• Provide support for ASP.NET MVC
• Provide improved support for WPF
• Provide improved support for FBML (FBML Server Controls)
• Provide a login control that can be used to replace the BasePage and/or MasterPage for Canvas Development
• Improve out of the box support for Extended Permission Prompts
• Refactor core source to improve maintainability and design
• Fix known bugs

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The team worked closely with the Concept Development Team at Microsoft to help design the Silverlight and WPF support. Also, after discussions with Microsoft it was decided that the namespaces and methods should be updated again to be more consistent with traditional .NET apis. This will cause some breaking changes to everyone as they move to 3.0. But, the main goal is that we wanted to get it right this time so that this could become an officially supported client library. Microsoft is working with Facebook to get the toolkit identified as the officially supported library. The plan is to provide real-time support and updates to keep the toolkit in synch with the Facebook API.

The developer toolkit and SDK is available on CodePlex. You can download it here.