The definitive guide to posting a Facebook Feed item using pure C# - facebook

Question

Does anyone have a definitive way to post to a user's wall, using nothing but the .NET Framework, or Silverlight?
Problems deriving from people's attempts have been asked here on SO, but I cannot find a full, clear explanation of the Graph API spec and a simple example using WebClient or some similar class from System.Net.
Do I have to send all feed item properties as parameters in the query string? Can I construct a JSON object to represent the feed item and send that (with the access token as the only parameter)?
I expect its no more than a 5 line code snippet, else, point me at the spec in the FB docs.
Thanks for your help,
Luke

Answer 1

This is taken from how we post to a user's wall. We place the data for the post in the request body (I think we found this to be more reliable than including all the parameters in the query part of the request), it has the same format as a URL encoded query string.
I agree that the documentation is rather poor at explaining how to interact with a lot of resources. Typically I look at the documentation for information on fields and connections, then work with the Graph API Explorer to understand how the request needs to be constructed. Once I've got that down it's pretty easy to implement in C# or whatever. The only SDK I use is Facebook's Javascript SDK. I've found the others (especially 3rd party) are more complicated, buggy, or broken than rolling my own.
private void PostStatus (string accessToken, string userId)
{
UriBuilder address = new UriBuilder ();
address.Scheme = "https";
address.Host = "graph.facebook.com";
address.Path = userId + "/feed";
address.Query = "access_token=" + accessToken;
StringBuilder data = new StringBuilder ();
data.Append ("caption=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode ("Set by app to describe the app."));
data.Append ("&link=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode ("http://example.com/some_resource_to_go_to_when_clicked"));
data.Append ("&description=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode ("Message set by user."));
data.Append ("&name=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode ("App. name"));
data.Append ("&picture=" + HttpUtility.UrlEncodeUnicode ("http://example.com/image.jpg"));
WebClient client = new WebClient ();
string response = client.UploadString (address.ToString (), data.ToString ());
}

Answer 2

I don't know much about .net or silverlight, but the facebook api works with simple http requests.
All the different sdks (with the exception of the javascript one) are mainly just wrappers for the http requests with the "feature" of adding the access token to all requests.
Not in all requests the parameters are sent as querystring, in some POST requests you need to send them in the request body (application/x-www-form-urlencoded), and you can not send the data as json.
If the C# sdk is not to your liking, you can simply create one for your exact needs.
As I wrote, you just need to wrap the requests, and you can of course have a method that will get a json as parameter and will break it to the different parameters to be sent along with the request.
I would point you to the facebook documentation but you haven't asked anything specific so there's nothing to point you to except for the landing page.