Do you run a website that routinely publishes new content? If so, does your site offer a syndication feed? A syndication feed is an XML file that summarizes the most recently published content and is commonly used in blogs, news sites, sports sites, social networking sites, and other content producing websites to provide a machine-readable format of the latest content. For the longest time the .NET Framework did not include built-in support for syndication feeds, meaning that if you needed to generate a syndication feed or parse the syndication feed from another site you either needed to:
The good news is that syndication functionality was added to the .NET Framework version 3.5, namely with the addition of the classes in the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace. This namespace includes a classes that model a syndication feed and the items that compose the feed, along with classes for formatting a syndication feed into either RSS 2.0- or Atom 1.0-compliant XML. (RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 are the two leading syndication feed format standards.)
For more information, check out my latest article on DotNetSlackers.com, which looks at creating and consuming syndication feeds using these new classes in the .NET Framework 3.5 from an ASP.NET application: How to Create a Syndication Feed For Your Website.
Happy Programming!