So the other day I was adding a “news page” to one of my projects and thought it was a great chance to play with consuming some other RSS feeds that had related information to what I was working on. So I started looking round and found the RSS Toolkit that had an RSS Data Source control that is perfect for consuming RSS feeds – the toolkit actually does much more, you should have a read on Dmitry’s blog (he wrote the toolkit and in on the ASP.net team) download the toolkit here.
I have also used the ASP.net AJAX Toolkit (which if you are unaware is a collection of controls for use with ASP.net AJAX, its an open source project with contributors from both MS and the community) the control I use is the so you can see a list of the Blogs and click each to reveal the text.
To use this you will need to have ASP.NET AJAX RC1 installed.
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Simple page layout using CSS, the right panel contains a Datalist control bound to the RssDataSource to display the blog items, the datalist control is wrapped in an asp:UpdatePanel. The item template in the datalist has a collapsiblepanelextender from the AjaxControlToolkit to display the description of the blog item.
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Chaging the selection of Blog to view fies the asp:UpdateProgress panel to display, the blog items are loaded and displayed. You can see on the Blog list I have simply shaded the background of the
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The code for this is pretty simple with all thanks going to the AjaxControlToolkit team and Dmitry for the RSS reader.
ASPX Markup
List of blogs on the left....
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DataList Control.....
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C# Code Behind
As you can see each Link button is hooked up to an OnCommand Event Handler and the argument identifies which blog feed to bind to the data source.
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....finally on the page I have added a little bit of Javascript to change the CSS class of the blog list item to indicate which one is active.
If ele (the
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Hope you find this as useful as I did - download the full source here.