Notice Technologies - ASP.NET Facebook Controls

ASP.NET Facebook Controls

If you are an ASP.NET developer who has dabbled in Facebook, odds are that you have had some difficulty. Simply put, there are *no* shortcuts. It isn't easy to use your existing skills to build Facebook applications - you have to write a lot of custom code to handle common scenarios. The development team at Notice Technologies has built a series of ASP.NET Facebook controls designed to dramtically reduce the time and effort required to build Facebook apps in ASP.NET. Below is a summary of our first set of controls, which is due to release in Beta in August 2008.

Friend Picker

It is currently not possible for someone to use Facebook’s Friend Picker if they are writing a Facebook app in ASP.NET. Additionally, Facebook’s Friend Picker cannot be called from within an iframe. We have created 95% of the functionality with our own ASP.NET Friend Picker. The only thing we don’t have is Filter by Network, which we are planning to add soon. Currently devs who want to use a Friend Picker inside their app must rewrite it from scratch or use something that was developed in the open source community, so this is a big time saver. Take a look at the screenshot below.

Notice Technologies - ASP.NET Facebook Controls - Friend Picker

Caching User Manager

Currently, FBML is by far the most efficient way to access friend data from within a Facebook application. FBML tags are used to call friend data from Facebook’s servers, which are displayed to the user immediately. For PHP or ASP.NET, each query is a separate request of the Facebook API, which results in very poor performance especially for users with a high number of friends. Our Caching User Manager helps developers circumvent performance issues by running a single query for all or groups of friends, and storing user/friend data for 24 hours, in accordance with Facebook’s Terms of Service.

Notification system

We searched high and low on the Web, but we couldn't find a comprehensive ASP.NET based notification system for Facebook, whereby a user could be prompted via e-mail, SMS, Facebook notifications upon any triggering event. So we created one. We added some rules to govern the delivery of messages such as reminders and time of day limitations. The features are similar to what a user gets with Twitter today for instance. You’ll also notice that on this screen, we have another embedded control, which is

Notice Technologies - ASP.NET Facebook Controls - Notifications & Subscribe to Friends

Subscribe to Friends

This allows a dev to embed subscription features within an app… so a user will only hear about certain friends’ activities on a subscription basis. This feature lets the User control the flow of information from certain friends within your app.

Inline Search

Developers often need to embed a user-context search capability within a Facebook app… i.e. something that an end user can quickly access to find friends, groups, applications, events, etc… anything an end user is a part of. This becomes particularly important for more active end users with hundreds if not thousands of associations. We have a styled dropdown to mimic the look and feel of Facebook – for when developers need to add search to an ASP.NET Facebook app.