Microsoft and Facebook Announce Partnership

Microsoft and Facebook have announced a partnership deal. This comes right after Facebook opened up its API to third party developers. The Facebook platform is already available in the new mashup tool Popfly that Microsoft announced a week back. Microsoft has also released some walkthrough videos and a Developer Toolkit for Facebook on its site. Dan Fernandez and Sean Alexander have a rundown on what has been announced so far.

• Popfly Facebook Block: Available immediately,
  we’ve added the Facebook block which prodices access to Facebook data
  including the User Profile, Friends, Photos, Photo Albums, and Events.
• Leverage Existing Blocks:
  You can build Facebook applications using Popfly blocks like Flickr,
  Digg, Soapbox, Twitter, Windows Live, Xbox Live, and Virtual Earth.
• Silverlight Support:
  Another big win here is Facebook has native support for Easily build
  next generation applications using Silverlight. With 24 million users
  and 40 billion page views a month, this is a huge, huge win for getting
  native Silverlight support on Facebook
• Visual Studio Support: The Facebook Developer Toolkit enables developers to build applications for Windows, Web, or Microsoft Office.
• Distribution of the Facebook Developer Toolkit.
  The FDT was developed by Microsoft to wrap the Facebook API into a
  managed component. Through this component, developers now will be able
  to drag ‘n drop a Facebook component onto the component tray in Visual
  C# Express , Visual Basic Express and Visual Web Developer (for both
  Whidbey and Orcas). Users will be provided all the source code, sample
  applications including a WPF app and detail documentation.

• Co-branded Landing Page
  on the Facebook developer website. At this site, visitors will be able
  to see Microsoft Visual Studio Express and Microsoft Popfly links.
  Additionally, a series of new pages were developed called Showcase on the Visual Studio Express site.