Editor's Note
RSS is Here!
RSS is a great, example of how a technology like XML can be used to improve the overall user experience. RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a description of a simple XML schema that can be used to describe the contents of a Web destination. Its most common use is to provide updated summaries of the latest headlines on a site, including a headline, summary, and links to the actual articles. As Cookie Monster might say, "So crazy, just might work."
The sites themselves are responsible for providing their own XML-formatted RSS feeds. This information can be provided in a static file or dynamically. It's the client's job to turn the XML into a list of headlines for the user. A client can graft any combination of feeds into one list and update it regularly. (And, of course, a client can actually be an intermediary, like a Web app.)
RSS Headline Display
So what's this have to do with us? We've been working on several Web projects of late to make our site more valuable to readers. One such enhancement—the MSDN Magazine RSS feed—is now live. We've been experimenting with creating an RSS feed from our site so you can get an XML summary of each month's articles.
To get to the new MSDN Magazine feed, go to https://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/rss and check out our sample offering. (Right now it's the current issue's contents.) If you don't have a client installed, you can look at it directly in your browser, where it'll show up as plain XML. The feed for an article might look like this:
<rss version="2.0"> <channel> <title>MSDN Magazine</title> <link>https://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/</link> <description>The Microsoft Journal for Developers</description> <language>en-us</language> <ttl>1440</ttl> <item> <title>ASP.NET: Create Snazzy Web Charts and Graphics On the Fly with the .NET Framework</title> <link>https://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/02/ASPDraw/ </link> <description>Knowledge workers can understand data more effectively when raw numbers are presented in a graphical format. This is especially true when displaying database information on a Web page, where a simple chart can make the difference between a dry presentation and a vivid data source. In the past, creating dynamic, data-based charts on the fly in ASP required purchasing a third-party, image- generating COM component. Now with ASP.NET, developers can access the .NET Framework's drawing classes directly with C# to create dynamic images and charts. </description> ... <pubDate /> </item>
Once you have an RSS client (the one shown here is called FeedExpress), you'll get a headline display comparable to what you see in the screenshot. There's a wide variety of software available now—if you don't have any, just Google up "RSS 2.0 software." MSDN has a sample news aggregator at Building a Desktop News Aggregator.
We always welcome suggestions for making our Web site more useful. Drop a line to our Webmaster, John Caricato, at mmeditor@microsoft.com if you have ideas you'd like to see in action.
Sample Update Last month, we introduced a small sample application—an MP3 playlist maker written in Visual Basic .NET. We've received lots of mail on this, so here's an update.
The original version was written with Visual Studio .NET 2003, so it didn't load for everyone who tried it. We've created a version that's compatible with the release build of Visual Studio .NET 2002. Since the FolderBrowserDialog object is not directly supported, it's been removed from the code—you'll have to type the path into the edit box yourself or write an overload. Depending on your system resources, there's also a memory ceiling that the program may or may not hit. (The app will start to churn virtual memory at some point.) If you experience this firsthand and come up with a fix for it, drop us a line and you may be featured in a future Editor's Note. You can download the updated code now at EditorsNote0304.exe.
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