Question

Under a timeline, therefore the salient point is “quickly” and willing to throw some $ at it too (not meaning I’ll pay the correct answer, but rather for a commercial product 🙂 ).

Looking for an RSS feed generator usuable in .NET framework 2.0. Ideally it would be easy to use (inferred quick) but flexible enough to support the multiple standards (shown part way down this page).

We have the business classes in .NET and want to publish RSS feeds on the ASP.NET website.

Any software that’s good?
Doesn’t have to be free.
Must support .NET framework 2.0

Thanks.

Candidates and Reasoning

• Semweb – appears to be on indefinite hiatus – likely not a good idea to pick up
• ROWLEX – based on Semweb, not fond of using something whose core engine is not being updated
• Linq2Rdf – appears overly complicated for a quick solution
• ASP.NET RSS Toolkit – tried it and appears to generate an old/simplified format – hasn’t been touched in a while

Answer 1

here’s some vb.net code that I’ve used to generate a rss feed from a collection in our BLL:

Dim xws As New XmlWriterSettings()
xws.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8
Using xw As XmlWriter = XmlTextWriter.Create(XmlFileName, xws)

    xw.WriteStartDocument()
    xw.WriteStartElement("rss")
    xw.WriteAttributeString("version", "2.0")
    xw.WriteStartElement("channel")
    xw.WriteElementString("title", Title)
    xw.WriteElementString("link", Link)
    xw.WriteElementString("description", Description)
    xw.WriteElementString("managingEditor", Editor)

    Dim items As System.Collections.Generic.List(Of FolderDocuments) = FolderDocuments.GetFolderDocuments()
    If items IsNot Nothing Then
        For Each fd As FolderDocuments In items
            xw.WriteStartElement("item")
            xw.WriteElementString("title", fd.Title)
            xw.WriteElementString("description", fd.Intro)
            xw.WriteElementString("link", fd.Url)
            xw.WriteElementString("pubDate", fd.DateStart.ToString("R"))
            xw.WriteEndElement()
        Next
    Else
        xw.WriteStartElement("item")
        xw.WriteEndElement()
    End If

    xw.WriteEndElement()
    xw.WriteEndElement()
    xw.WriteEndDocument()
End Using

This writes to a file, but you could easily use a generic handler (.ashx) to pass parameters to that would generate the required rss feed on the fly – use Response.Output for the xml writer.