Windows Developer Center > Downloads > Facebook SDK >  WinForm Development

Toolbox Configuration

If you are developing a Winform application you should add the FacebookService component to your toolbox in Visual Studio. To do this, right-click in the area of the toolbox where you want the controls to go, and select “Choose Items” from the pop-up menu.

In the window that appears, click the “Browse…” button, locate Facebook.Winforms.dll, and open it. Click “OK”, and the FacebookService component and the various user controls should appear in your toolbox.


To start utilizing the Facebook API, you will need to add the FacebookService component to your project. To do this just drag an instance of FacebookService from the toolbox onto the component tray and enter your API.


The FacebookService component contains methods that wrap all of the methods of the Facebook API.  The following provides an example for getting all the friends of the logged in user.  This method returns a generic collection of user objects.  The user object is a strongly typed representation of a Facebook User profile.

Using the FacebookService Component

In order to leverage the Facebook platform from a winform application you first need to establish a Facebook session on behalf of the user of your application. The first time a user is using your application, this will require showing them a Facebook login page and then getting back a new secret key that is specific to their session and also the session key associated with the Facebook session that they just initiated. The Toolkit provides an easy wrapper method that allows you to do this. Allow you have to do is call ConnectToFacebook on the instance of FacebookService that you created by dragging it onto your form. After you have a valid session you can access the various elements of data using accessor properties on your FacebookService instance. When calling ConnectToFacebook you can optionally pass in a set of Required Permissions that the user should be prompted for when logging in to your application.

  • service.uid - the Facebook user id of the logged in user
  • service.SessionKey - The session key of the current Facebook session (used when posts requests to Facebook on behalf of this user)
  • service.Api - an instance of the Facebook.Rest.Api class. This is where all of the Facebook Rest interfaces are implemented.
  • There is also an accessor for each Facebook Rest Api (so you don't have to go through the Api class to get there (ie. Friends, Stream, Notifications, Events, Groups, etc.)

Now that we have a valid session, we can use the FacebookService to make Rest api calls.  For more information on the Rest api, go to http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/API.  The following provides an example for getting all the friends of the logged in user. This method returns a generic collection of user objects. The user object is a strongly typed representation of a Facebook User profile.

Visual C#

using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Collections.ObjectModel;
using Facebook.Schema;
...

IList<user> friends = FacebookService1.friends.getUserObjects();

Visual Basic

Imports System.Collections.Generic
Imports System.Collections.ObjectModel
Imports Facebook.Schema
...

Dim friends As IList(Of user) = FacebookService1.friends.getUserObjects()

Using the User Controls

If you have just simple needs and want to display some typical facebook information, we have provided some user controls.

  • EventList - Lists all the events owned by the logged in user
  • FriendList - Lists all the friends of the logged in user
  • FriendMap - Uses virtual earth to map the location of the logged in user's friends
  • PhotoAlbum - Simple album showing the photos that the logged in user has posted

The following walks through the basic steps you would need to do to use leverage one of these controls

  1. Drag a FriendList from the toolbox onto the design surface for the form



  2. Find Load in the Event list in the property window, type Form_Load.  Press Enter.



  3. In the generated Form_Load method, set the Friends property of the FriendList control to the Collection returned by calling the GetFriends method of the FacebookService. As shown here:

Visual C#

private void Form_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
       friendList1.Friends = FacebookService1.friends.getUserObjects();
}

Visual Basic

Private Overloads Sub OnLoad()
         friendList1.Friends = FacebookService1.friends.getUserObjects()
End Sub
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