Stream of Items

Flat feed list

wvk — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 21:26:30 GMT

At times it's useful to ignore the hierarchy of the Feeds in the Common Feed List. By itself the RSS Platform does not provide a flat enumerator. However, the syntactic sugar is easy enough to write in C#. Actually, Eric (IE PM and Mr. Fiddler) asked me for the snipped and he put it up on EnhanceIE.com. EnhanceIE.com contains a bunch of useful trips regarding IE development. Look for "Working with the Windows RSS Platform" for the snippet.

RSS Snippets for Visual Studio 2005

wvk — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 21:59:00 GMT

Are you writing RSS feeds by hand? Are you using Visual Studio 2005?

I've found myself doing both esp. when giving presentations. During my recent webcast "Adding Feeds to Your Website" I created a static feed from "scratch" and added SLE sorting and filtering to the feed.

Whoever has done live "coding" in a presentation knows that typing a lot of boilerplate text is error prone as well as it bores the audience.

Fortunately, VS 2005 has Code Snippets, which does the boilerplate typing for you. It works similar to IntelliSense with the added twist that the user can create custom snippets. I created a couple of XML Snippets that are RSS-specific. Download the rss.snippet file and import them VS 2005 via

Tools | Code Snippets Manager | Import...

Now create a new Xml file and type

<[ESC]rssfeed[TAB]

Which means type less-then followed by the ESC-key to cancel the IntelliSense drop-down, then type rssfeed followed by the Tab-key which will expand the word to

<item>

<guid>http://example.com/0</guid>

</item>

</channel>

</rss>

I used Snippy to help me create the snippets.

I hope this is useful to some of you.

MiniSDK - C++ Sample

wvk — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:48:43 GMT

A while ago I posted about the RSS MiniSDK which contains the header files in order to write C/C++ code against the RSS Platform API. Since then I've gotten several questions regarding the use of the header files. One of the first problems some of you have run into is the "unresolved externals" link error for CLSID_XFeedsManager. Instead of going into each issue, I've put together a "most-minimal" sample project. It's a VC++ 2005 project.

Hope this helps!

RSS Platform MiniSDK

wvk — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 00:40:02 GMT

With the release of IE7 Beta 3 the RSS Platform has been API complete, meaning we don't anticipate making breaking changes to the API going forward. We have been holding true to that goal in IE7 RC1, there have been no breaking changes to the RSS Platform API in RC1.

Using the API from script and/or managed code is quite trivial b/c the type information is readily available for those languages.

However, when using C++ to access the RSS Platform it's preferable to have the header file and/or the type library (.tlb). The msfeeds.h and msfeeds.tlb are included in the Windows SDK. I can understand that not everyone is willing to install the entire Windows SDK (RC1 download) just to get the msfeeds.h header file, so I put together

RSS Platform - Mini SDK

which includes the necessary headers to get you started. Just add the header files to your project and include msfeeds.h in your source file.

Don't be concerned that the name of the zip file contains the words "Beta 3". Since the API hasn't changed in RC1 since Beta 3, the Beta 3 header is still valid. Give it a try and let me know what you are using the RSS Platform for.

Signed Interop Assembly

wvk — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 04:38:00 GMT

Visual Studio makes the use of the RSS Platform relatively easy. All one has to do, is add a reference to the RSS Platform:

Visual Studio will create the appropriate interop library. However, the resulting interop assembly is not signed which means it can't be used by another signed assembly (required strong name). In order to create a signed interop assembly one has to use the command line tool called TLBIMP which is part of the .NET Framework SDK. TLBIMP has two arguments which allow you to specify which key to use:

/keyfile:
/keycontainer:

Use either of them and TLBIMP will create a signed interop assembly.

v1 of the RSS Platform will *not* ship with a signed interop assembly or Primary Interop Assembly (PIA). However, to make this it easier for developers we are looking into providing a signed interop assembly or a PIA in the future.

[Updated 8/29/07] fixed typo as reported by mob1, thanks! As well as fixed image references

“Mom I’m on M-TV”

wvk — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 09:54:09 GMT

Earlier today, I posted about my M-TV appearance on the RSS team blog…

Inaugural Post

wvk — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 09:49:15 GMT

Today at lunch I was presented the following fortune cookie and it was clear that I could no longer delay my entry into the world of MSDN bloggers:

"You will be recognized and honored as a community leader"

With such a fortune it's time to start my stream of though items… the stream will mostly contain my thoughts on RSS, the Windows RSS Platform, RSS in IE7 and topics of interest related to the former. If fortunes come true the stream will contain items of value to the community… we'll see about the leader part…. <g>