Microsoft has announced a new open source library for integrating Facebook into Windows apps.

The Windows SDK for Facebook is designed for use by developers creating Universal Windows apps for both desktop and phone. It supports Windows Phone 8.1, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. The SDK is essentially a replacement for the existing Facebook SDK for .NET  and lets you integrate Facebook functions such as Authorization, Like and Graph into your Windows app. The library is fully native so the CLR is not a dependency.

Although the post about the new SDK on the Windows claims that the new SDK "carries forward the most popular capabilities of the existing .NET SDK" some of the more advanced options from the previous SDK appear to have been dropped. 

In terms of authorization, you can add the ability for users of your app to log in or out of Facebook, including adding a login button. You can give them the means to set their profile picture, and can show the Feed and Request dialogs so they can complete the relevant details in your app. The Graph support enables you to add the ability for your users to post to their feed, upload photos, and Like a Page or Object.

The main feature that seems to have been dropped from the new SDK is the ability to create and run Facebook Queries using FQL, the Facebook Query Language. FQL lets you use a SQL-style interface to query data exposed by the Graph API, and this was supported in the previous Facebook .NET SDK. However, Version 2.0 of the Facebook Platform API is the last version to support FQL and it will be unavailable after August 2016. The functionality it offered has been added to the revamped Graph interface.

The new Windows SDK for Facebook can be found on GitHub: along with sample projects that show how to integrate the library into your app, with samples showing how to let users log in, display user information, and post to the user timeline via the feed dialog. There are also samples showing how to launch the app request dialog to send requests to friends, and to display the list of user’s likes.

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