RSS in .NET Made Easy with XML Serialization

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Update 2010-03-23 – Sorry, but the images and downloads were hosted on a server that is no longer available.  I will try to find the sample code bits and images on a backup sometime!

Based on my previous rants, here’s a stereotype for this post:

<<Casual_English_Used>>

So I was looking for a real quick way to publish an RSS feed from a Web application I created for a friend and found some great articles and components (RSS Toolkit for ASP.NET 2.0.)  However, I didn’t find anything that used XML Serialization (specifically) to work with the RSS 2.0 Specification (maybe my Google skills are truly weak today.)  I use XmlSerializer religiously, and thought it would be quite trivial to build a set of classes to quickly create and publish an RSS feed.   Thus, as any geek would do, I did just that.

Take a gander at the following model:

These classes are adorned with System.Xml.Serialization attributes, which comply with the RSS 2.0 Specification.   To create an RSS document, it’s no more difficult than creating and populating a PONO (Plain Ole .NET Object.)

RssDocument rss = new RssDocument();

rss.Channel.Title = "My Feed";

rss.Channel.Link = "http://www.example.com/";

rss.Channel.Description = "A very cool feed on fun stuff.";

rss.Channel.Items.Add(new RssChannelItem());

rss.Channel.Items[0].Title = "Post #1";

rss.Channel.Items[0].Link = "http://www.example.com/content/post1.html";

rss.Channel.Items[0].Description = "The details for Post #1...";

rss.Channel.Items[0].Guid = "00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000";

To generate the XML for this feed, simply call the ToString() method:

rss.ToString();

It’s that simple!  Who’d have thought it’d be this easy :)  What’s more, I created a method to fetch an RSS feed and deserialize it into an instance of RssDocument (listed below.)

/// <summary>

/// Creates an RssDocument instance based on the RSS feed at

/// the specified URI.

/// </summary>

/// <param name="uri">The URI of the RSS feed to be loaded.</param>

/// <returns>

/// An instance of RssDocument based on the RSS feed

/// at the specified URI.

/// </returns>

public static RssDocument GetFeed(string uri)

{

    RssDocument feedDocument = null;

    WebClient client = null;

    byte[] feedData = null;

    MemoryStream ms = null;

    XmlSerializer xs = null;

    try

    {

        client = new WebClient();

        feedData = client.DownloadData(uri);

        ms = new MemoryStream(feedData);

        xs = new XmlSerializer(typeof(RssDocument));

        feedDocument = xs.Deserialize(ms) as RssDocument;

    }

    catch (Exception ex)

    {

        //

        // TODO: Handle Exception.

        //

        throw;

    }

    finally

    {

        ms.Close();

        ms.Dispose();

        client.Dispose();

    }

    return feedDocument;

} 

http://www.scottvanvliet.com/downloads/Boardworks.Rss.zip

Enjoy!