Anyone Need A .NET Open Source Rss Library

Jul 10, 2006 oss rss dotnet suggest edit

I have been considering using a separate library for generating the RSS and Atom feeds in Subtext. My first thought was to use RSS.NET but I noticed that there seemed to be no recent activity.

I contacted the admin and found out that RSS.NET has been bought by ToolButton Inc and will be released as a product. Very cool!

In the meanwhile, I still need an open source RSS library to package up with Subtext. Fortunately, RSS.NET was developed under the MIT license which, as I mentioned before, is very compatible with our BSD license.

So one option is to simply copy the code into our Subtext code base. My only qualm about this approach is that I would like to keep stand-alone libraries that are not central to the Subtext Domain out of the Subtext codebase as much as possible, preferring to reference them as an external library.

Ideally, I would like to start a new project that is essentially a fork in RSS.NET, perhaps called FeedGenerator.NET (call me the forkmaster). I could probably host it on CodePlex in order to give me an opportunity to try it out and provide feedback. Would anyone find such a library useful other than us blog engine developers? Anyone have a better name?

I probably wouldn’t spend much time on this project except to provide changes and bug fixes as needed by Subtext. It would by no means be intended to compete with Web 2.0 Tools products, since they are probably going to be much more full featured than our humble needs. Besides, under the MIT license, any improvements we make would be available for them to roll into their product (following the terms of the license of course). It is the beauty of the MIT and BSD licenses.

Any thoughts? Suggestion? Etc…?

Found a typo or mistake in the post? suggest edit

Comments

26 responses

Jon Galloway • July 10th, 2006
I've been through this a bit, too. See my post here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgal...
I've been thinking the best approach for this kind of thing is an open source feed layer that implements the interfaces supported by the Windows RSS Platform, but uses a provider based system for persistence. That's a bit more complex than just branching the RSS.NET project, but it seems like it would be a good direction to head in.
Jim Holmes • July 10th, 2006
Will RSS Toolkit work for you? (http://www.asp.net/download...
It's shared source licensing, which may or may not meet your needs.
(I haven't used it, but James wrote an article on it for our book.)
Haacked • July 10th, 2006
Sounds interesting. Is there a way for others like myself to contribute to it?
Some of the features we have in our Subtext RSS feeds include Gzip compression, RFC3229 for feeds support (aka delta encoding). I didn't see mention of these two features.
Greg Young • July 10th, 2006
I like Jon's idea but I might take it one step further than the provider pattern and create a domain as there is also significant validation logic on creation of the items (which would also be nice to have abstracted in a nice way)
Jiho Han • July 10th, 2006
Would this be limited to "generating" feeds?
If there was any intiative to start an open source project related to feeds, I would love it if it were all-encompassing - generating and parsing.
Ryan Anthony • July 10th, 2006
I vote for Feeder.NET :)
What other types of things do you do with your RSS feed?
Haacked • July 10th, 2006
Jiho: Initially yes. If you are looking for something to generate and parse feeds, check out the RSS toolkit.
Ryan: Right now, Subtext's RSS Feeds support E-Tags, If-Modified-Since, Delta-Encoding, and Gzip compression. I would want something that supported all that.
Tiernan OToole • July 11th, 2006
it would be nice, but would also have to support Atom 0.3 and 1.0. there is atom.net, but that only supports atom 0.3. i was playing with the windows feed API, which works well, but if you need to use it on a server, you have to have IE7 installed...
Ray Booysen • July 12th, 2006
Definitely interested in this. Will it be launched under the BSD license?
Lets do this thing! :)
Haacked • July 12th, 2006
Ray, yeah, I would use the BSD license.
Tiernan: I'd want to support Atom 1.0 as well, hence the name Feeder.NET or FeedGenerator.NET.
Marco Trova • July 12th, 2006
Why not: http://www.asp.net/download...
?
Haacked • July 12th, 2006
Marco, I haven't found a way for others to contribute to that project. I'd like a truly open source project in which to build a small community of developers around it.
Simone Busoli • July 14th, 2006
Phil, maybe if you ask the author of the RSS toolkit sandbox project he could agree on letting you build an open source library on top of it. His name is Dmitry: http://blogs.msdn.com/dmitr....
Haacked • July 16th, 2006
I talked to Dimitry. He says he'll look into starting a CodePlex project.
Simone Busoli • July 16th, 2006
Good to know!
Brian Kuhn • February 24th, 2007
You might want to check out my RSS 2.0/ATOM 1.0 class library written in C# and available with a permissive license. It is (in my biased opinion) more feature rich than RSS.NET currently is, as it supports both ATOM and RSS as well as an extensible model for implementing the common RSS extensions feeds use.
Check out Oppositional.Syndication if you are interested in grabbing the binaries or source code.
Boris • April 4th, 2007
I'd like to participate in such open-source effort.
RSS.Net really seems to be dead for a while and there is a need for a good replacement.
Starting from toolkit sounds good if it really can be LGPL/GPL/X11 licensed.
KWJ • April 17th, 2007
Perhaps the FeedGenerator from the http://WWW.FEEDOW.COM, is what you are looking for. It's free to use.
/Klaus
Laimis • July 2nd, 2007
Besides people offering another alternatives, has the source code for RSS.NET been "branched off" into another project so that the people could contribute?
Haacked • July 2nd, 2007
@Laimis - Well there's this one http://www.codeplex.com/ASPNETRSSToolkit
Laimis • July 3rd, 2007
Thanks, I will check it out.
Scott • March 11th, 2008
Did anything ever get settled in regard to this? Just found RSS.net is unmaintained unless you want to buy ToolButtons version.
Alan • April 2nd, 2008
Checkout the Argotic Syndication Framework http://www.codeplex.com/Arg... (open source)
Gergely Orosz • January 18th, 2009
@Alan: Argotic seemed to be a bit too heavyweight for me at first glance. However after trying out it worked like a charm (even though it's obvious it was designed to be capable of handling more than just RSS but it does that good as well). I encourage others to use it as well.
Joshua Price • April 7th, 2009
Argotic is well documented and easy to use for a first timer to this sort of thing :)
jack • June 8th, 2014
Would like (-: