Get user's facebook wall feed in .net

Question

I want to display a user's wall feed and news feed on my site. How can I do this?

Is there any way to pull the feed without having to get an authorization token?

If I need a token, how do I get that?

Answer 1

The proper (I would go so far as to say "required by Facebook's terms and conditions") way to do this would be to get an authorization token, which involves a pop-up div asking the user if they would like to permit your site (application) to access their information.

You can customize the level of access you'd need and they would be prompted only for that. By accepting, you'd be able to access a token within their cookie. Armed with that token and your application ID and your "application secret" you can make requests to the Facebook Graph API for any data you'd like. (You use the application secret to decrypt the user's cookie, from which you obtain the access token to pass to Graph API requests.)

It's not as simple as just scraping their wall and displaying it, you'd be responsible for grabbing the individual pieces of data and organizing the display.

Edit:

In response to your comment, here is a quick tutorial for working with cookies in .NET. A Google search for "ASP .NET cookies" or "VB .NET cookies" will yield much more as well. There is an example (in PHP) here demonstrating how to decrypt the cookie. I haven't found any .NET examples, but the code here is pretty straightforward. The cookie name is "fbs_" + your application ID.

It appears to be a delimited string, so just read in the whole thing in your debugger and see what the value(s) look like. The value you want appears to be called "sig" (but, again, debug to make sure) and it looks like they're using an MD5 hash to obtain it. You can read up on what the md5() function in the PHP code is doing here and it should be easy to find a .NET analogue for that.

Once you have the access token, it's up to you how you want to get the information. I'd recommend doing it all in JavaScript just to offload the whole thing to the client's browser, not to mention that most samples you'll find online (such as in Facebook's API documentation) will be using JavaScript. But if you want to do it all server-side, Facebook's C# SDK will be of some assistance. You basically pass it the token and the Graph API path you want and it returns a JSON object with all the data.