Microsoft RSS Blog

My last post shared some of our conceptual designs of the feed icon and expressed some of the criteria that we are using to select the right icon. Several of the comments liked icon #4 simply because it looked liked the Firefox icon, and many (like this...

It’s great that a discussion of icons has recently restarted in the RSS community. We are in the process of figuring out what icon to use on our toolbar in IE7 to represent feeds. There are five parts of the experience for feeds in IE7: discovering if...

We've received some reports of users noticing that their feeds subscription stop updating after upgrades. Our investigations show that these tend to occur after upgrades from one pre-release build of Windows Vista to another version. If you're encountering...

IE7 Beta 3 is here ! We’ve snuck in some goodies in the feed reading user experience based on your Beta 2 feedback (keep the comments coming!). We are feature-complete for feed reading in IE7, but we’re still looking for feedback to make tweaks and fixes...

As noted pretty much everywhere on the web, Windows Vista launched (for businesses) last week. Windows Vista includes IE7 and the Windows RSS Platform , and is therefore the first Windows operating system to ship with built-in support for RSS (and...

Last summer, we had a couple of interns on the RSS team here in IE: Nate Furtwangler, a developer intern, and Chrix Finne, a Program Manager intern. Nate and Chrix both did an amazing job helping us to ship IE7 and Vista, and they also found the time...

On the IE blog , Eric Lawrence presented the User-Agent string for the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 which will be available later this year. The RSS Platform will also introduce an updated User-Agent string for use with the IE8 beta. For details...

It's always fun when a story hits the blogosphere while you're stuck on a plane. :) This will be short, because I'm connecting over a 14.4K modem line (I have the deepest sympathy for folks who still do this every day!), but I just want to say a few basic...

You might have read the c|net article " Blog feeds may carry security risk " which summarizes the presentation given by Robert Auger and Caleb Sima of SPI Dynamics. The presentation points to potential dangers of malicious script embedded in feeds. This...

A while ago I posted details about the RSS Platform Download Engine. That post focused on downloading of feeds, but did not include additional details on enclosure downloads.     Enclosures are, as most readers know, files that are "attached" to items...

To get started with feed reading experience in IE7, you need to first find a feed and then subscribe to it. This post covers how to do just that. Discover We expect most users to encounter a feed through the Feed Discovery button located on the...

Here in Windows, we’re working hard on Windows Vista Beta 2, and we've recently been doing some work on how we parse feeds. Our years of experience in with HTML in Internet Explorer have taught us the long-term pain that results from being too liberal...

Sam Ruby pointed out HTTP 410 GONE support in feed readers or rather the lack thereof. He links to the list of User-Agent strings that continue to request the feed that is gone. One of the entries points at the Windows RSS Platform as an "offender": ...

The feed reading experience in IE7 is meant to be lightweight and simple. We display the accumulated feed's contents in one scrollable view, like a webpage. This is great for news feeds and blogs where you want to scan the feed content to catch an interesting...

John and I have been working on a sample application using the Windows RSS Platform . It's a screen saver which displays the image of RSS posts that have image enclosures. The screen saver is based on the Visual Studio 2005 Screen Saver Starter Kit. We...

I think it's only appropriate to congratulate the Windows Live Writer team on the release of their Beta by posting this entry using the Windows Live Writer Beta itself. I've been using their internal release candidates for several weeks, and I have to...

In the last few weeks, we have got some questions about how to display the IE7 Feed View in RTL (Right-To-Left) reading order, which is used by several languages. The good news: we do have support for RTL. IE decides whether to show a feed in RTL...

A couple weeks ago, Chris Jones (VP on the Windows Live team) announced the new Windows Live suite. Included in this suite are two things of potential interest to readers of this blog: First, the beta release of Windows Live Mail -- a desktop email client...

Hey! This is Arvind. I am a Software Design Engineer in Test in the RSS Team working on among other things, the implementation of the Simple List Extensions in IE7 and the Windows RSS Platform. There have been a few posts on RSS in IE7 regarding the...

We just shipped the Windows RSS Platform with the IE7 Beta 2 Preview and questions about the RSS Platform are sprouting up . I wanted to address one of the most common questions first: how should applications can take advantage of platform? Within...

One of the great things about RSS is that it's being used all over the world in countless ways. Millions of sites publish RSS feeds and hundreds of products consume those same feeds. The downside of this popularity, however, is that with that many implementations...

Hello, Walter from the land of IE Program Managers here. You might have seen or read about the RSS functionality in the user interface of IE7 Beta 2 Preview. There is a bit more to it then just letting users subscribe and read feeds from the IE7 user...

One question we get asked occasionally is: How do I back up my feed list? Well, it turns out that there is a standard way to save a feed list in a single file for backup or other purposes. It's called OPML , and IE7 supports importing and exporting feed...

What better way to spend a Friday afternoon (Redmond time, at least), than by filling out a quick 8 question survey on your RSS reading habits , hosted by the MSR Asia Center for Interactive Design? Even if you don't take the survey, the results will...

Jane talked about reading feeds with ease in IE7 Beta 3. I want highlight what is new in the Windows RSS Platform in Beta 3. With the release of Beta 3, the Windows RSS Platform is now API complete . This means that, barring any serious bug that we...