Beckh@m's Blog

Facebook to outlook

First, Facebook as a very successful social networking website already contains a lot of information that we need and that will save us a lot of work not only to get this information but to use it as well.

Second, as you already know, we all work in the morning sometimes we don’t have time to turn around and certainly don’t have time to open up a browser window and typing the Facebook URL and start logging in, it seems a lot of time which sometimes we don’t have. But yet we would like to update our personal status on Facebook. So how can I do that without wasting all that time?!

The solution is pretty easy, we all have outlook opened up since the very first second you boot up your computer at work as all work related mails comes through outlook, so why don’t we make it a bit funny and use it to update our status.

The “Facebook to Outlook” plug-in consists of two main features

1. Friends to Contacts.
2. Update my status.
3. Send notification messages.

So in this post I’m gonna walkthrough how to make the first plug-in as the rest is pretty much the same. Okay, let’s go

Friends to Contacts:

As a Facebook user I have a lot of friends on Facebook and those friends already published their information and I would like to have those friends in my outlook contact list. So instead of writing down the information of my Facebook friends I just thought it will be nice to have a button that I can click and it does all the work of getting my friends information and adding them to my outlook contact list.

The bad thing is the Facebook REST services don’t allow you to get the email address of friends but I guess it’s better to just modify an existing friend and add the email instead of adding the entire contact information.

Getting friend’s information from Facebook.

To get started developing applications with the Facebook API, you first need to register your application and get an API key from Facebook which will allow you to connect to their site and download data. Their Get Started page will lead you through the process.

Now that you have an API key, you can start developing. While you can connect to Facebook and get the information manually through HTTP REST calls,

Okay we first need to get the list of facebook friends:

Next, we bind the friends list FriendSelected event, to allow the user to select his friends he wishes to add as outlook friends

Next, we add some code to the SelectedIndexChanged list to allow a user to remove a friend he already selected.

Finally, we write the code to move the facebook friends to our outlook contacts.

and the final output is

Beckham