Today Microsoft announced its partnership with Facebook. With this new partnership, both companies will work together to empower the Facebook users to develop upon the Facebook social graph. Microsoft will distribute the Facebook Developer Toolkit. The FDT was developed by Microsoft to wrap the Facebook API into a managed component. Through this component, developers now will be able to drag ‘n drop a Facebook component onto the component tray in Visual C# Express , Visual Basic Express and Visual Web Developer (for both Whidbey and Orcas). Users will be provided all the source code, sample applications including a WPF app and detail documentation. Along with all this, developers will also have all the source code to everything.

There’s also going to be a co-branded landing page on the Facebook developer website. At this site, visitors will be able to see Microsoft Visual Studio Express and Microsoft Popfly links. Additionally, a series of new pages were developed called Showcase on the Visual Studio Express site.

Microsoft Popfly Support has been developed as well. Facebook users who have little to no development experience can create simple quick mash-ups with the Facebook block.

Facebook has 40 billion page hits a month and has an open registration (which is growing 100,000 new users a day or 3% a week). It has 24+ million active users.