If you’ve already gone to the trouble of verifying your account and getting early access to the new facebook timeline, you might want to share this awesome feature with your friends. If they’re the type that can’t be bothered to go through all the steps (or have concerns about the verification step), you can simply invite them as a developer and they too can get early access to facebook timeline.

If you want invites, find someone on your feed already talking about getting the timeline enabled and ask them to invite you. If they say they don’t know how, send them this post. They should let you know when they’ve finished #4. Then check out the section For the Invitee.

For the Inviter:

1. visit https://developers.facebook.com/apps and go to the app that you created to get verified and click on Edit Roles:

2. You can then add a new developer:

3. Type in your friend/s’ name/s

4. You should see this untill your friend accepts the developer request.

For the Invitee:

1. if your friend has finished inviting you, you’ll get this notification:

2. click on it and you’ll be taken to a page to install the developer app. Once finished, you should see a link that will ask you to confirm your developer request:

3. Once you’ve confirmed, go to the facebook homepage and you should see this notification on the top. Click Get It Now and enjoy Timeline!

Had the urge to build a new app recently when I came upon this. Since facebook doesn’t support mobiles in SG yet, I have to go with the credit card option. What’s going on? I’m not sure I want to give my cc info especially with all those click-jacking apps floating around. But now that I think about it, maybe those apps are the reason why facebook is putting this extra security measurement. Still though, I’m not comfortable with giving out CC information, too scared I’d end up with a bajillion facebook credits because I clicked a link. :/

I’m glad I created a lot of apps in the past, maybe I’ll try and recycle the ones I’m not going to use anymore…

I have been mulling over this problem for a few months now. For some reason, I experience getting this message

The page you requested was not found.
You may have clicked an expired link or mistyped the address. Some web addresses are case sensitive. I mentioned this in a few of my previous posts

whenever I try to access my Facebook applications when I am logged out. But when I log in to Facebook first THEN access the URL, I am able to resolve the application. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one experiencing the problem http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?pid=96845#p96845 First reported in January this year and until now this issue has not been closed.

THE FIX:

1. Edit the settings of your application –> Enable Developer Mode –> save

   
Wax On…

SAVE!

2. Edit the settings of your application –> Disable Developer Mode –> save

 
Wax Off…

SAVE!!

3. log out and try to access your Applications URL

This worked for all the apps I was having issues with so I hope it works for the rest of you guys too. A few people were reporting how the application would resolve in their dev sites but then would cease to work once they ported them over to their Test sites. Highly likely, once the developers have the application and deploy it into a test scenario, they don’t bother going into “Developer Mode” before spreading the application which is probably why they are experiencing this. I hope they fix this soon. I’m relieved that my apps work fine now…

I missed the release of the latest version of the Facebook Developer Toolkit from clarity consulting so I decided to play around with it after our Mix It Up event.

There have been much changes to the toolkit since the last time I looked into it. It took me a few minutes to try to figure out how to get a simple application out. The documentation posted here is a bit outdated so let me post my own little how-to. They’ve actually made it a lot easier but the new API needs a bit of getting used to I guess. It’s a bit confusing as the APIs for CanvasFBMLBasePage is different from CanvasIFrameBasePage. I hope they standardize soon though. Considering that this is supposedly an RC, it doesn’t seem like they’ve settled on a convention yet.

So again, assumption is:

1. You’re using C# as your language

2. You’re building an app with the CanvasFBMLBasePage (haven’t tried out the Master Page yet.. baby steps my friend)

1. Visit http://www.facebook.com/developers and Setup A New Application. Expand the optional fields and set up your application, making sure you have the following details filled in:

2. Once you have successfully set this up, take note of your API Key and Secret:

3. Fire up Visual Studio 2008 and set up a new ASP.NET Web Application

4. Open up Default.aspx and remove everything but the first line (which is the page directive that says tells .NET which is the CodeFile. Your default.aspx should look something like this:

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"  CodeFile="Default.aspx.cs" Inherits="_Default" %>
<asp:label ID="Content" runat="server" text="Label"></asp:label>

// For convenience, I added an asp.net label control where I would write out the FBML later on. If you’d rather use Response.Write() you could do that as well. Then you wouldn’t need to have the second line on Default.aspx

5. Before we dig into the CS files, we’ll need to add a reference to the facebook dlls that we can download from codeplex. Simply select to download bin.zip and it should give you the dlls necessary for you to build a Facebook app. Unzip this in a location you can easily find. Go to your Solution Explorer and right-click on your project –> Add Reference

Click on the Browse tab and navigate to where you extracted the binaries for the toolkit. You will want to add a reference to both facebook.dll and facebook.web.dll //yes, the non-caps irks me too.. wait till you see the classes *sigh*

When you finish adding these two necessaries, it’ll pull some other files along for the ride as well so don’t be surprised about that.

6. Now that’s finished, we can open up our .CS file and start by importing the necessary namespaces namely:

using facebook;
using facebook.web;

and then, make our class inherit from the CanvasFBMLBasePage class that is part of the toolkit. This base class should take care of all the nitty gritties of dealing with Facebook and making sure it knows who you are (or in this case, your application)

public partial class _Default : CanvasFBMLBasePage
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {

    }
}

7. Before we proceed, lets add a snippet to our web.config file to set our APIKEY and secret. The base class will be looking at our web.config file for the values to use to authenticate with Facebook. All you need to do is find this section:

and replace it with something like:

<appSettings>
  <add key="APIKey" value ="8e38f5fc72b989b8146dc91ece7e9b6a"/>
  <add key="Secret" value ="d9a5bd957d3aa1c69316839f1543fce0"/>
</appSettings>

of course put in the APIKey and Secret that was provided to you by Facebook. Don’t go using my key, it won’t work with your URL anyway Make sure you SAVE!

8. Going back to Default.aspx.cs, we can now proceed to add logic to our application.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    base.Page_Init(sender, e); // this is the code that will call the base

                               // methods that deal with authenticating 

                               // with facebook and all that mumbo jumbo

if(!IsPostBack)    {
    stringuid = base.API.uid.ToString(); // this is the code to retrieve

                                          // the userid of the logged in user 

                                          //(the person accessing your application

   Content.Text = "<fb:profile-pic uid='" + uid + "'/>";               // You can also do something 

   Content.Text+= "hello, <fb:name uid='"+ uid + "' useyou='false'/>"; // like Response.Write( 

                                                                       // "<fb:profile-pic uid='" +

                                                                       // uid + "'/>"); for this part

   Content.Text += " you have "+ base.API.friends.get().Count + " friends so far "; 

   //anything you need to know about your user, you will find from base.API – all your base are belong to us

}}

9. Once that’s done, we can now go and publish our application by right-clicking on the project in solution explore and selecting publish

Make sure you are publishing to the Callback URL you specified when you applied for the Application Key and Secret.

10. When you’re done publishing and you try to access the application, you should see something like this:

and when you click allow, you’ll get:

Some issues I noticed though is that when I try to access the application URL when I am logged out, Facebook tells me that the page cannot be found. But when I access it when I’m already logged in, it’ll prompt me to allow the application to access my information if i have not yet added the app. I’m checking with the forum on codeplex to see whether this is a Facebook issue or whether it’s the Tool’kit’s

Congratulations! You have now built your first FBML based Facebook application! Will let you know how far I go with this new framework.

It seems to be cleaner code right now, but I guess I’ll need to fool around with this to find out more.

Hope this helps!