Introducing the Facebook Azure Toolkit

An open source project hosted on CodePlex promises to streamline the development of Facebook applications that also leverage Microsoft’s Cloud platform. The Facebook Azure Toolkit is currently available for download under a Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), which is an open source license. Ahead of anything else, the toolkit is designed as a resource for developers that are looking to bridge their Facebook applications with Windows Azure. Its makers underlined the fact that the Toolkit should be used by devs that already know how to build Facebook apps, or are willing to learn on their own.

“The Facebook Azure toolkit provides the ability to rapidly develop Facebook applications that leverage Windows Azure to profit from all the benefits of the cloud with a solid framework based on best practices. Facebook applications hosted in Azure provide a flexible and scalable cloud computing platform for the smallest and largest of Facebook applications. Whether you have millions of users or just a few thousand, the Facebook Azure Toolkit helps you to build your app correctly so that if your app is virally successful, you won’t have to architect it again. You will just need to increase the number of instances you are using, and then you are done scaling,” revealed Christian Klasen, Microsoft senior business development manager.

In order to access the project, devs will need to be running the Release Candidate (RC) development milestone of Visual Studio 2010. According to the Toolkit’s description, it brings to the table the Facebook Developers Toolkit, the Ninject 2.0 for Dependency Injection, Asp.Net MVC 2, Windows Azure Software Development Kit (February 2010), AutoMapper, Azure Toolkit – Simplified library for accessing Message Queues, Table Storage and SQl Server and automated build scripts for one-click deployment from TFS 2010 to Azure.

There are a number of tasks which all developers will need to complete in order to get their project up and running. “Set up a facebook developers account. Set up an iframe facebook application. Set up an Azure Account. Set up a database in Sql Azure. Set up a storage account in Azure for Table Storage, Message Queues and Blob Storage,” the makers of Facebook Azure Toolkit instructed.

Visual Studio 2010 Premium Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.

.NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.

SOURCE: Softopedia