Struggling to understand the structure of the Facebook API - c#

Ultimately I want to create a desktop app that allows users to update their own status, view status' of their friends, update pics etc. - basically a lot of the functionality the facebook website provides. Through looking through some tutorials and sample projects it seems that an app must be created for the facebook account. Now is this the facebook account of the developer (i.e. mine) - which will provide an API key that will allow any other user to log in?? Does every desktop project need to authenticate the user through a facebook dialog window to take the users' credentials?? Where does OAuth fit into this?? If anyone can shed any light as to the structure of the facebook api and the ways in which I can grant this functionality from say a WPF C# app for example I would really appreciate it.
EDIT: Before complaints of a potentially huge question or too 'vague', my question is specific to the integration/use of the facebook API in desktop applications - not how to then retrieve status feeds etc. I'll work that out myself.

Per Facebook documentation, all desktop apps will need to implement some form of web browser integration, whether embedded within the desktop app or controlled.
See: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/
Desktop Apps
Our OAuth 2.0 implementation does not include explicit desktop app
support. However, if your desktop app can embed a web browser (most
desktop frameworks such as .NET, AIR and Cocoa support embedding
browsers), you can use the client-side flow with one modification: a
specific redirect_uri. Rather than requiring desktop apps to host a
web server and populate the Site URL in the Developer App, we provide
a specific URL you can use with desktop apps:
https://www.facebook.com/connect/login_success.html.
Don't worry it took me two solid days of trial and error and re-re-reading of the documentation on authentication to finally "get" it.

Related

Creating my own external authentication service

I'm trying to find a full tutorial on creating your own extent authentication service. Similar to the ones you see that say "Login with Google" or Facebook or Twitter... How do I create my own version of those? Including allowing creation of "apps", creating their app key and secret.
Maybe I'm searching for the wrong terms when looking, I'm not sure.
Ive have a need for a central login service where applications will be able to login a user and receive their information if they have sufficient permissions.
I'm using c# and web api 2 if this helps.
Thanks
IdentityServer (3 or 4 depending on your .Net preference) would be a good place to start. It is an open source project that supports the OAuth2 / Open ID protocols and is very well documented to show you where to plug in your app into the pipeline. https://identityserver4.readthedocs.io/en/release/index.html

Winforms auth using current account password

In my win-fourms application, I would like to do something like to use the account password similarly to how apple has the touch id API. I could not find any information on this. Here is an example I saw in the built in groove music app in windows 10:
Thank you!
When Microsoft built the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) they built in an authentication library that allows you to use user's Microsoft Accounts. There is no built in support for this in WinForms or WPF apps.
However, you can use the Microsoft OAuth endpoint to accomplish the same thing, it just won't look the same (requires a browser popup for starters). More information can be found here:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-v2-protocols-oauth-code
The code basically requires doing a bunch of REST calls and providing a listening socket for an asynchronous response.

Social networks notifications in a C# application

I'm planning to write an application in c# in visual stuio 2013 that will allow a facebook user to login and receive their facebook notifications straight to the desktop as popups. Ive searched around and cannot seem to find whether or not it is possible to get notifications from facebook as soon as they happen and react to them in a suitable way, i'm wondering if this is possible and which bits of the api/ sdk i would need to use to get this to work.
Thanks in advance,
Alistair
Reading from the Facebook Developer's page(https://developers.facebook.com/), there isn't any specific SDK to C#, for desktop applications
.
But there is a SDK for Javascript, maybe a web application can be an option for you.

C#/.NET Desktop App Based on Instagram's API (For Offline Use & No Database Connectivity)

For my semester assignment, I want to make a simple C#/.NET windows desktop application that will call the Instagram API and use its Photo Effects/Filters.
But my professor has said that the app must be a standalone windows desktop app which means it should not have any internet or database connectivity.
For example: If a user selects an image/photo from his computer using the desktop application (that I want to develop), I want the application to show a bunch of instagram filters that can applied to that image (without internet or any database connection).
My basic question: Is it possible for me to develop such an app that uses the instagram API but does not need any internet or database connectivity? If it is possible, can you guys guide me? I have visited instagram.com/developer/authentication/ link but I am not sure what to do. And if it is not possible, is there any other way to make an app that applies some effects/filters to an image? Please help me out. Thanks.
EDIT: I am still a little confused though. When we use intagram on phone, we use internet only when we want to upload a photo. Filters are offline features. So is there any way I can get these features from the API? As my teacher said I 'can use API but not internet' I assumed APIs can work without the need of an internet connection.
To implement offline image processing, you would either need an assembly of the filters or the actual code. I don't think that Instagram provides such tools. But there are plenty of third party libraries out there for image processing, if that's what you are looking for. For instance the AForge image processing.

How to authorize my app with Facebook

I know I have seen apps that log me in using Facebook but never present me with an authorization screen. I can not, for the life of me, figure out how to do this with Windows Phone 7. The best I have been able to get is using the Facebook for C# SDK to get the authorization screen in a WebView. This looks hideous and the page does not even appear to be mobile ready.
I have searched high and low for an answer and have found nothing. Wondering if anyone can point me in the right direction to getting this to work?
Yes, I also saw this kind of apps (e.g. Spotify prompts you to enter your Facebook account credentials rather than using the normal authorization flow). My best guess is that they either some kind of premium partners and have access to some private APIs or they use custom authorization flows (e.g. when you authorize an app on a website, the system saves authorization key in the database. The same app id/secret is then used in Windows Phone app and all you need to do is to type in your email/username in order for the system to locate authorization key that was saved earlier).
I also don't like the approach of displaying Facebook login/auth using WebBrowser control (mostly because of UI inconsistency) but I'd say that this is still the way to go in most cases (because this is the official and recommended way of authorizing the app and all other approaches seem hacky for me and also have their disadvantages).
You will want to be using the "server-side authentication" approach. The following document describes how it works: Server-side authentication (read also OAuth Dialog documentation for how to configure the authentication dialog). You can change the way the UI looks by passing a display parameter (either to touch or wap).
Please note that display=touch is currently broken in Windows Phone - Facebook always falls back to wap which is deprecated and will be removed as per July 2012 update (corresponding case: Facebook API can't be used with Windows Phone apps). It's also among known issues on Facebook C# SDK project page: Facebook C# SDK - Known issues.
Hope this clarifies things a bit.

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