What are the pros and cons of using .Net to develop Facebook Apps?

Question

Choice of programming language is an early decision which it is expensive to get wrong. Does anyone have any practical experience of developing for Facebook using .Net and MS vs LAMP? What are the pros and cons?

Answer 1

I wrote a Facebook Application using Silverlight and ASP.NET and I can tell you that the only benefit is that you don't have to learn a new language.

If you are already proficient in .NET, you can just go ahead.

Answer 2

Particularly with the new API, the Facebook platform is much simpler to program against than it has been in the past. There are really no concerns which language you choose, as long as you can do REST-style requests, then you should be golden.

So just choose whichever language you're most comfortable with, really.

Answer 3

The only official client library issued by Facebook is for PHP (not including mobile). All the others are community developed and maintained.

That said, Facebook recommends all new application use the iframe option rather than FBML. This means using the OpenGraph (aka Facebook Connect) javascript libs to interact with Facebook. You will still need to use server side libs for some things, for example for tabs, which must be FBML based.

Use whatever language you are comfortable with. OpenGraph is fairly language agnostic since a lot of it runs on the client side as javascript. When the PHP libs are updated, it's fairly simple to look at the code to see how Facebook interacts with their systems. It's pretty much just passing json data. So if you need a cutting edge feature, you can add support yourself.