Salesforce.com has updated its .NET developer tools, announcing two new toolkits for Windows developers targeting the Force.com REST API and Chatter API.
The toolkits contain a set of native libraries for the Microsoft .NET framework, NuGet packages that support deployment and versioning in Visual Studio, and sample applications. The toolkits also support Microsoft’s Portable Class Libraries, adding compatibility with desktop Windows, Windows Phone, Azure and Windows Server apps.
“Until recently, all that was available to developers using the Microsoft .NET Framework—and consequently building applications for Windows, Windows Phone and even Silverlight—were the APIs themselves,” wrote Salesforce evangelist Wade Wegner in a blog post. “We love .NET developers (I’m one myself), and there is a large constituent of .NET developers within the Salesforce community.”
Salesforce designed the toolkits with one core library to support as many Microsoft platforms as possible, and to use asynchronous programming to avoid performance bottlenecks and app blocking. Developers can also use dynamic objects in C# to avoid creating a class to represent each Salesforce object.
Wegner explained in the blog post that Salesforce is planning additional improvements as well, for instance a Visual Studio extension and support for other APIs such as the Streaming API, SOAP API and Tooling API.
The source code for both toolkits and their libraries is hosted on GitHub.
