Websites that produce new content on a regular basis should include a syndication feed, which is a specially formatted XML file that includes a summary of the most recently
published items. Virtually all blogs, news sites, and social media sites have a syndication feed, and 4Guys is no exception. The
4GuysFromRolla.com syndication feed contains the most recent articles. Syndication feeds are meant to be
consumed by computers. Sites like Technorati parse the syndication feeds from blogs and use that data to determine the topic du jour.
Also, syndication feeds are commonly used by websites to display the latest headlines from related sites. For example, an ASP.NET community website could consume
the 4GuysFromRolla.com syndication feed to display the latest 4Guys headlines.
Until recently, there was no built-in support for creating or consuming syndication feeds in the .NET Framework. That changed with the release of the .NET Framework version
3.5, which included a new namespace: System.ServiceModel.Syndication.
This new namespace includes a handful of classes for working with syndication feeds. As aforementioned, syndication feeds are XML files, and for the syndication feed to be
of any use it must conform to one of the popular syndication feed standards. The two most popular syndication feed standards are
RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0, and these are the standards
supported by the classes in the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace. But there is a third format that, while not as popular as RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0, is still
used. That standard is RSS 1.0.
The good news is that with a little bit of work we can create a class that works with the RSS 1.0 standard and have this class used by the syndication feed-related classes in
the .NET Framework 3.5 can be. This article introduces a free library, skmFeedFormatters, which you can use in an ASP.NET 3.5 application to create and consume RSS 1.0 feeds.
(This same concept could be applied to creating and parsing Atom 0.3 feeds, as well.) Read on to learn more!
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