RssNewsFeed is a free .NET library written in C#, which allows you to access an rss  feed without going through the hassle of parsing. It will  extract feed information, together with the news items, and return them as a collection of objects.

(RSS is a Web content syndication format and is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a dialect of XML and so all RSS files must conform to the XML 1.0, as published on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website).

Using the library

The RssNewsFeed consists of three public classes, ContentSyndication, SyndicationChannel, and SyndicationItem. A SyndicationChannel  object is returned by the ContentSyndication class when the GetContent () method is returned, and contains information about the requested channel. It also contains a collection of SyndicationItem objects which contain information about each news item.

To use the library in your application, insert a referenece to the RssNewsFeed.dll by right-clicking on the Reference tree node in the Visual Studio IDE. Select Add Reference, and then select Browse. After you've located the dll, select Ok.

Insert the namespace Cyberise.RssNewsFeed in your application, and create an instance of the ContentSyndication class. See the sample code for more information.

The RSSNewsFeed has its own exception class NewsFeedException, which is thrown in the event of an error. A descriptive message together with the actual exception which caused the error are passed off to the calling application. These can be accessed via the Message() and InnerExecption() methods respectively.

Features

• Parses rss versions 0.9,0.91,1.0, and 2.0
• Returns feed's logo website as bitmap object.
• Free for commerical and personal use.

Documentation

Latest html documentation on how to use the assembly is available from  here. A compiled help file is also available.

Download

The latest version of RssNewsFeed can be accessed from here. Sample demo code on how to use the assembly library is also included in the zip file. The library was compiled using the .NET 1.0 framework.

Contact

If you would like to contact me for queries, comments, or to report a bug, please click here. Although the library is free for commercial or personal use, I would appreciate a link to this page placed on your site and please send me an email so that I can add a link to your application from my site and build up a list of applications using the library.

Version history

1.0 Initial version
1.1 Rewrote xml parser to handle incorrectly formed rss news feeds. Released for public use.