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RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET

The Microsoft ASP.NET team have released a pretty nifty add-on toolkit for VS 2005 ASP.NET 2.0. Scott Guthrie has a nice step by step pictorial tutorial on his blog.

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

Features:

• RSS Data Source control to consume feeds in ASP.NET applications
• 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.
• 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 that can be either placed in GAC or in the “bin” directory of a web application. Full source code is included in the package. Download it now.