How to add RSS feature to my web site?

Question

Hello everyone,

I am using VSTS 2008 + C# + .Net 3.5 + IIS 7.0 + ASP.Net to develop a simple web application. I want to add RSS feature to some of the pages of my web site, so that people could use their popular RSS reader to receive notification of content update.

Any easy way to do this in my development environment? I only need very basic RSS feature.

thanks in advance, George

Answer 1

I would suggest you to use the new Syndication API that comes with .NET 3.5. Here is an example from a MSDN How to: Create a Basic RSS Feed article:

public class BlogService : IBlog
{
    public Rss20FeedFormatter GetBlog()
    {
        SyndicationFeed feed = new SyndicationFeed("My Blog Feed", "This is a test feed", new Uri("http://SomeURI"));
        feed.Authors.Add(new SyndicationPerson("[email protected]"));
        feed.Categories.Add(new SyndicationCategory("How To Sample Code"));
        feed.Description = new TextSyndicationContent("This is a how to sample that demonstrates how to expose a feed using RSS with WCF");

        SyndicationItem item1 = new SyndicationItem(
            "Item One",
            "This is the content for item one",
            new Uri("http://localhost/Content/One"),
            "ItemOneID",
            DateTime.Now);

        SyndicationItem item2 = new SyndicationItem(
            "Item Two",
            "This is the content for item two",
            new Uri("http://localhost/Content/Two"),
            "ItemTwoID",
            DateTime.Now);

        SyndicationItem item3 = new SyndicationItem(
            "Item Three",
            "This is the content for item three",
            new Uri("http://localhost/Content/three"),
            "ItemThreeID",
            DateTime.Now);

        List<SyndicationItem> items = new List<SyndicationItem>();

        items.Add(item1);
        items.Add(item2);
        items.Add(item3);

        feed.Items = items;

        return new Rss20FeedFormatter(feed);
    }
}

Answer 2

There is an open-source .net class library called RSS.Net. See http://www.rssdotnet.com/