Alert RssFeed user Kenneth Ekman identified a bug in RssFeed when displaying RSS feeds whose <pubDate> dates were not given in GMT. My mistake was to parse the <pubDate> string using the DateTimeFormatInfo's “r” format specifier, which looks deceptively similar to the RFC 822's specification for dates. One oversight on my part, though, was that the “r” format specifier requires that the date be in GMT, whereas RFC 822 allows for GMT (or UT) along with common U.S. time zones (EST, EDT, CST, CDT, MST, MDT, PST, PDT) and military time to boot. Problem was, feeds using one of these other time zone monikers was causing parsing the date to barf, which would default the date displayed to the current date and time.
Anywho, I fixed the problem by using the <pubDate> parser in RssBandit. Props to Dare Obasanjo (and the other contributors) for the code and for the great program that is RssBandit. The latest version of RssBandit can be downloaded from the RssFeed GotDotNet Workspace. Thanks to those who have used RssFeed, there's been over 1,200 downloads to date!
For those who don't know, RssFeed is an open-source, custom ASP.NET server control for displaying RSS feeds. Check out a live demo!