I’m still on “blog vacation” today but I am reading feeds and this struck me as interesting enough to post. Daniel Cazzulino has a great post about new functionality in .NET 3.5 that allows you to easily create and consume RSS and Atom Feeds. Here’s an excerpt…
A *very* welcome addition to .NET 3.5, which just went RTM for MSDN subscribers and trial for the rest before general availability early next year: System.ServiceModel.Syndication.This namespace, which lives in the System.ServiceModel.Web.dll assembly which provides the WCF Syndication functionality, contains useful classes for working with feeds and items. I won't go over the Architecture of Syndication, How the WCF Syndication Object Model Maps to Atom and RSS, How to: Create a Basic RSS Feed, How to: Create a Basic RSS Feed, How to: Expose a Feed as both Atom and RSS or the basics of Syndication Extensibility. All those links provide enough to get you started.
Two points here…
- It’s fantastic that Microsoft is integrating this technology into the framework and allowing users to easily work with feeds. Supporting existing technology in a way that makes it easy for .NET developers to use is what Microsoft should have been focusing on the whole time. The strategy of trying to define new standards for their technology that no one else supports just doesn’t work and I very much expect huge parts of Microsoft’s current Web Services Strategy (for example) to fail. But allowing me, as a developer, to use the technology everyone else is using in a way that only takes 12 lines of code instead of 1,500 (which is what I think it would take to parse every different kind of feed in a language such as php) is what will keep me coming back to .NET
- That said, Microsoft really needs to get the version numbers and product delineations under control. The fact that C# 3.0 is part of .NET 3.5 which contains WCF, WPF, WCS and WWF et al. which don’t have version numbers at all. So when I see Windows Communication Foundation Unleashed on Amazon will it teach me how to use feeds like the above examples? (It won’t) C#, the .NET Framework, VB.NET, and all the various Wxxs should all share one version number and should all be released in tandem with each other. All these different names and version floating around is just confusing.
Anyway, back to vacation. See everyone (again no one) Monday.