Thursday, February 23, 2006

ASP.NET 2.0 RSS Toolkit

Here's another useful .Net 2.0 code library, which I found linked from this MSDN blog post by Scott Guthrie. It provides flexible, configurable RSS functionality for both consuming and generating RSS feeds.

Scott's posting provides a great step-by-step tutorial on the basics of using this, including screen shots - excellent work.

RSS syndication is becoming pretty much pervasive, so making supporting it this easy can only be a win.

The RSS Toolkit for ASP.Net 2.0 can be found here, and is definitely one to add to the toolbox.

1 comment:

Joel Hammond-Turner said...

Good question!

As always, whatever solution you choose, your mileage will vary, but I guess the biggest reason for using this library is the strong typing.

From what I've read (and not yet having had a chance to play with this in anger, this library allows you to create strongly typed feeds both inwards and outwards, making mapping to an underlying data object simpler, but also offering all sorts of possibilities for notification streams, etc.

The penalty, of course, of doing everything in a strongly typed manner is the same as for webservices - if the provider changes the format, you need to re-compile (assuming you're not compiling-on-the-fly) to get the latest feed object structure.

I still think it's a good toolkit item tho'.