ASP.NET RSS Toolkit

The RSS toolkit includes support for consuming as well as publishing RSS feeds in ASP.NET applications. Features include:

• RSS Data Source control to consume feeds in ASP.NET applications
• Works with ASP.NET data bound controls
• Implements schema to generate columns at design time
• Supports auto-generation of columns at runtime (via ICustomTypeDescriptor implementation)
• Caching of downloaded feeds both in-memory and on-disk (persisted across process restarts)
• Generation of strongly typed classes for RSS feeds (including strongly typed channel, items, image, handler) based on a RSS URL (the toolkit recognizes RSS and RDF feeds) or a file containing RSS definition. Allows programmatically download (and create) RSS channels using strongly-typed classes. The toolkit includes:
• Stand-alone command line RSS compiler
• Build provider for .rssdl file (containing the list of feed URLs)
• Build provider for .rss file (containing RSS XML)
• Support for generation of RSS feeds in ASP.NET application including:
• RSS HTTP handler (strongly typed HTTP handlers are generated automatically by the build providers) to generate the feed.
• RSS Hyper Link control (that can point to RSS HTTP handler) to create RSS links
• Optional secure encoding of user name into query string to allow generation of personalized feeds
• Set of classes for programmatic consumption and generation of RSS feed in a late-bound way, without using strongly typed generated classes

The toolkit is packaged as an assembly (DLL) that can be either placed in GAC or in ‘bin’ directory of a web application. It is also usable from client (including WinForms) applications.

RSS Toolkit works in Medium Trust (RssToolkit.dll Assembly either in GAC or in ‘bin’) with the following caveats:

• If the ASP.NET application consumes RSS feeds, the trust level must be configured to allow outbound HTTP requests.
• To take advantage of disk caching, there must be a directory (configurable via AppSettings[”rssTempDir”]) where the trust level policy would allow write access. However, disk caching is optional.

Complete sources are included in the package.