Today, as many of you probably already saw, Facebook announced some new APIs to further open up access to the Facebook Stream through their new Open Streams API. Microsoft participated in their Developer event, where we began to outline and demonstrate several investments we’re making in the coming months, to make developing for Facebook a whole lot easier for millions of existing and future .NET developers.

At the event, we gave an early look at what will be possible by demonstrating canonical applications built with Silverlight and .NET.  First we showed a Windows application, built with WPF, that shows the power of what .NET and Windows has to offer, via caching and sync, incredible performance, feed integration, automatic docking and adaptive UI, taskbar integration, search and more. The second was a Web application, built with Silverlight, that shows feed integration, profile exploring, and an incredible DeepZoom-based image viewing experience with unique UX constructs for viewing large amounts of feed and friends-related photographic data.  Check out the screenshots below to see for yourself how .NET and Silverlight will change the game in building rich apps with Facebook APIs.  We will continue to build out these apps and will also ship the sourcecode in the future.

You might already know that Microsoft and Facebook have been working together since 2007 via the Facebook Developer Toolkit – a first of its kind open source solution to help developers integrate into and build applications for Facebook users. Now developers have even more reason to be excited. The bottom line: if you are building an application for the web, desktop, or mobile, and want to make it social and integrate it with Facebook, we will provide the tools and resources you need to create visually stunning, cutting edge applications faster than ever before. Stay tuned for more details as we release them.

More Facebook Photo Cloud (Silverlight):

More Facebook Faboolous (WPF):