ASP.NET 2.0 Resources

• 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.

The RSS Toolkit automatically includes built-in caching logic so that RSS feed data is cached locally instead of fetched each time it is accessed/used. The RSS Toolkit supports caching this information both in-memory, as well as persistently to disk (for example: to survive worker process restarts or application resets). The benefit of this built-in caching integration is that you can efficiently subscribe and pull RSS data from a variety of remote sources without having to worry about your server blocking on remote network calls all the time. Note that the RSS toolkit by default uses an RSS channel’s TTL setting to control the cache duration semantics for you.