RSS Reader using ASP.NET 2.0 and C# 2005

ASP.Net Tutorials

RSS Feed is very popular in Internet. This tutorial will show you how to create a RSS Reader using ASP.NET 2.0 and C#.

In this sample, we created a simple function to process the RSS feed from a sample URL. This function define a string of rssURL as its parameter. This string contains the RSS's URL. It will use the value of rssURL to create a WebRequest.

WebRequest is the abstract base class for the .NET Framework's request/response model for accessing data from the Internet. An application that uses the request/response model can request data from the Internet in a protocol-agnostic manner, in which the application works with instances of the WebRequest class while protocol-specific descendant classes carry out the details of the request.

Requests are sent from an application to a particular URI, such as a Web page on a server. The URI determines the proper descendant class to create from a list of WebRequest descendants registered for the application. WebRequest descendants are typically registered to handle a specific protocol, such as HTTP or FTP, but can be registered to handle a request to a specific server or path on a server.

The response to this request will be put into WebResponse object. The WebResponse class is the abstract base class from which protocol-specific response classes are derived. Applications can participate in request and response transactions in a protocol-agnostic manner using instances of the WebResponse class while protocol-specific classes derived from WebResponse carry out the details of the request. Client applications do not create WebResponse objects directly; they are created by calling the GetResponse method on a WebRequest instance.

After then, the WebResponse object will be used to create a stream to get the XML data. Stream is the abstract base class of all streams. A stream is an abstraction of a sequence of bytes, such as a file, an input/output device, an inter-process communication pipe, or a TCP/IP socket. The Stream class and its derived classes provide a generic view of these different types of input and output, isolating the programmer from the specific details of the operating system and the underlying devices. The we used a XmlDocument to store the stream data. XmlDocument manipulating the data of XML, finally read the RSS contents from Feed.

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http://www.aspnettutorials.com/tutorials/xml/rss-aspnet2-csharp.aspx

ASP.NET AJAX RSS Reader

By steve.csharp

An ASP.NET AJAX RSS reader.

Introduction
So the other day, I was adding a “news page” to one of my projects, and thought it was a great chance to play with consuming some other RSS feeds that had related information to what I was working on. So, I started looking round, and found the RSS Toolkit that had an RSS Data Source control that is perfect for consuming RSS feeds – the toolkit actually does much more, you should have a read on Dmitry’s blog (he wrote the toolkit and is on the ASP.NET team) and download the toolkit here.

I have also used the ASP.NET AJAX Toolkit (which if you are unaware is a collection of controls for use with ASP.NET AJAX, it's an open source project with contributors from both MS and the community). The control I use is the Collapsible Panel control, so you can see a list of the blogs and click each to reveal the text.

Background
You will need to have the ASP.NET AJAX RC1 extensions installed, which you can get from here.

Using the code

Simple page layout using CSS, the right panel contains a DataList control bound to the RssDataSource to display the blog items, the DataList control is wrapped in an asp:UpdatePanel. The item template in the DataList has a collapsiblepanelextender from the AjaxControlToolkit to display the description of the blog item.

Changing the selection of blog to view files, the asp:UpdateProgress panel is set to display, and the blog items are loaded and displayed. You can see on the blog list that I have simply shaded the background of the

element to show the active blog.

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http://www.codeproject.com/KB/ajax/AspNetAJAXRssReader.aspx

A Custom ASP.NET Server Control for Displaying RSS Feeds

By Scott Mitchell

When creating this recommended blogs page, I decided rather than merely listing links to the various blogs, I'd like to also show the title of each recommended blog's most recent entries. This task is not too difficult to accomplish because blogs typically provide an RSS syndication feed. RSS is a standard that spells out a format for syndicated content in an XML format. (For the specifics of the format, see the RSS 2.0 specification.) There are a number of programs, called aggregators that are designed specifically to organize syndicated content. Some free aggregators build using the .NET Framework include SharpReader and RssBandit. You can also easily build your own aggregator, as I described in this article: Creating an Online RSS News Aggregator with ASP.NET.

Initially I decided to just use the techniques described in an earlier 4Guys article, Consuming an RSS Feed with ASP.NET, which demonstrates how to display the items in an RSS feed in a data Web control. However, the code to implement this technique, while only a few lines of code long, seemed overly complex for the simple task I was after. Furthermore, the code, as-is, does not employ any caching of the RSS data, which not only leads to longer load times on my end (since the content must be grabbed from a remote Web server on each page load), but is also bad netiquette since it greatly increases the bandwidth sucked down from the server hosting the blog. What I wanted to be able to do was the following: add a Web control to my ASP.NET Web page and with one or two lines of code, at most, have the control display the items from an RSS feed. Too, the control should cache the downloaded RSS feed for a developer-specified number of minutes.

To solve this problem I decided to create a custom ASP.NET server control, which I call RssFeed. RssFeed is an open-source control, with complete source code available for download and modification at the RssFeed GotDotNet Workspace. This article explains how to obtain, install, and use RssFeed in an ASP.NET Web page. For technical information about RssFeed and its source code, be sure to consult the RssFeed Project Page.

Downloading RssFeed
You can download the code and/or a compiled assembly for the RssFeed server control by visiting the Releases Archives for the RssFeed GotDotNet Workspace. From the archives, you can download the entire source code or a pre-compiled assembly (.dll file). (Note: the compiled assembly was compiled using Visual Studio .NET 2003, and is therefore targeted for the .NET Framework Version 1.1. If you need to use RssFeed for .NET Framework 1.0, you will need to download the source code and compile it through Visual Studio .NET 2002.)

If you download the source code, before using RssFeed in an ASP.NET Web application you'll need to compile the source code. If you have Visual Studio .NET, this task is simple - simply double-click the skmRss.csproj file in the downloaded code files, which will open Visual Studio .NET. Next, go to the Build menu and choose Build Solution. That's it! This will create the compiled assembly - skmRss.dll. (If you are going to be using RssFeed in an ASP.NET Web application on a Web server running the .NET Framework Version 1.1, you can just download the pre-compiled assembly instead, if you want to skip the step of compilation yourself...)

Using RssFeed in an ASP.NET Web Application
The first step to using RssFeed in an ASP.NET Web application is to add the assembly, skmRss.dll, to the Web application. If you are building your ASP.NET Web application using Visual Studio .NET you can accomplish this by adding the assembly to the References folder. From the Solution Explorer, right-click on the References folder, Browse to the skmRss.dll file, and click OK. If you are not using Visual Studio .NET, simply copy the skmRss.dll file to the Web application's /bin directory.

If you are using Visual Studio .NET you can, at this point, add RssFeed to the Toolbox. To accomplish this, right-click on the Toolbox in Visual Studio .NET and select Add/Remove Toolbox Items (the exact wording differs between Visual Studio .NET 2002 and 2003...). Browse to the skmRss.dll file and click OK. This will add a control called RssFeed to the Toolbox. To add the RssFeed control to an ASP.NET Web page simply drag the control from the Toolbox onto an ASP.NET Web Form's Design tab. As you can see in the screenshot below, RssFeed provides a rich design-time experience with Visual Studio .NET.

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http://aspnet.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/102903-1.aspx