Friday, November 03, 2006 6:51 PM
bart
Exploring the IE7 RSS platform in C# - Part 3
Introduction
Internet Explorer 7 introduces a unified approach to RSS. More information can be found on the RSS team blog. The good thing about it, is its availability for developers to consume the RSS feeds of the end-user, for example to build a custom RSS aggregator. Applications like the Windows Sidebar in Vista, the Windows Live Mail Desktop client, Outlook 2007 leverage the power of this API to provide multiple views on the same RSS information. In this series of blog posts I'm showing you little snippets to make a jumpstart with the RSS platform. At the end of this series, a nice (maybe geeky) application will bring together all of the pieces, so watch my RSS feed!
Getting started
For this simple demo, create a new C# Console Application in Visual Studio 2005 and add a reference to the COM component Microsoft.Feeds 1.0. This will build the required interop assembly to be used by our application to consume RSS feeds and obtain RSS information. In Program.cs import the Microsoft.Feeds.Interop namespace:
using Microsoft.Feeds.Interop;
Get notified!
The content of RSS feeds changes regularly (hopefully) so it's useful to get notified when new information is available. Luckily it's possible to do this using the API too. Here's the code:
void Main(string[] args)
{
FeedsManager mgr = new FeedsManagerClass();
IFeed feed = (IFeed)mgr.GetFeedByUrl("http://community.bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/rss.aspx");
IFeedEvents_Event watcher = (IFeedEvents_Event)feed.GetWatcher(FEEDS_EVENTS_SCOPE.FES_ALL, FEEDS_EVENTS_MASK.FEM_FEEDEVENTS);
watcher.FeedDownloading += new IFeedEvents_FeedDownloadingEventHandler(watcher_FeedDownloading);
watcher.FeedDownloadCompleted += new IFeedEvents_FeedDownloadCompletedEventHandler(watcher_FeedDownloadCompleted);
watcher.FeedItemCountChanged += new IFeedEvents_FeedItemCountChangedEventHandler(watcher_FeedItemCountChanged);
Console.WriteLine("Downloading from " + feed.Name);
feed.AsyncDownload();
new AutoResetEvent(false).WaitOne();
}
static void watcher_FeedItemCountChanged(string Path, int itemCountType)
{
Console.WriteLine("FeedItemCountChanged - Path={0}, Count={1}", Path, itemCountType);
}
static void watcher_FeedDownloadCompleted(string Path, FEEDS_DOWNLOAD_ERROR Error)
{
Console.WriteLine("FeedDownloadCompleted - Path={0}, Error={1}", Path, Enum.GetName(typeof(FEEDS_DOWNLOAD_ERROR), Error));
}
static void watcher_FeedDownloading(string Path)
{
Console.WriteLine("FeedDownloading - Path={0}", Path);
}
Important: Use IFeedEvents_Event as the interface type for the result of GetWatcher. Other types will result in an interop exception because interface types like IFeedEvents or IFeedWatcher or IFeedFolderWatcher cannot be casted too (due to interop restrictions).
This assumes you've subscribed to my feed on http://communities.bartdesmet.net/blogs/bart/rss.aspx via IE7. Now run the application, which should print the following (assuming the feed of my blog is outdated on your machine):
Next, go to IE7 to refresh the feed once more, to see you're notified about such updates (i.e. feed refreshes initiated by other apps):
And indeed, things work as expected:
Have fun!
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Filed under: Windows Vista, C# 2.0