RSS for Developers

Today RSS is primarily used for news sites, blogs, and increasingly for audio-based serialized content. But RSS has the potential for broader reach and for more deeply integrating the information it delivers across software and services. This page offers the latest news and advice for RSS developers.

Team Blog

Microsoft Team RSS Blog

The Team RSS blog provides regular updates about the work we are doing on RSS at Microsoft. Contributors come from several development teams at Microsoft, building RSS-related technology across a variety of platforms, products, and services. This blog is a forum for discussion and feedback, allowing the development community to be a part of that process.

The RSS Platform User-Agent String
On the IE blog, Eric Lawrence presented the User-Agent string for the beta version of Internet Explorer 8 which will be available later this year. The RSS Platform will also introduce an updated User-Agent string for use with the IE8 beta. For details on the RSS Platform User-Agent string in IE7 ple... more

Windows Live Suite has lots of RSS goodness
A couple weeks ago, Chris Jones (VP on the Windows Live team) announced the new Windows Live suite. Included in this suite are two things of potential interest to readers of this blog: First, the beta release of Windows Live Mail -- a desktop email client like Outlook Express or Windows Mail for Vi... more

Simple Sharing Extensions spec updates
You’ve probably seen the postings in the past on this blog about the Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) for RSS. SSE was originally introduced by Ray Ozzie on his blog as a way to enable syncing items between different points on the web. We’ve recently updated the spec to support Atom feeds as well. I... more

Resources

	Simple Sharing Extensions for Atom and RSS The Simple Sharing Extensions are extensions to existing feed formats. They enable loosely-cooperating apps to use Atom or RSS as the basis for item sharing, bi-directional, asynchronous replication of new and changed items amongst two or more cross-subscribed feeds.
	Simple Sharing Extensions (original 0.91 spec)
	Microsoft Simple List Extensions Specification Expose ordered lists of items more easily, and make them more accessible to users, through the Simple List Extensions to existing RSS feed formats.
	Frequently Asked Questions for Simple Sharing Extensions Learn the "what" and "why" of Simple Sharing Extensions.
	Atom Specification
	RSS 2.0 Specification

Technical Articles

	A Simple RSS Feed Here's a simple RSS feed reader you can build using Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition.
	Extreme XML: Building a Desktop News Aggregator Dare Obasanjo builds a C# application that retrieves and displays news feeds from various Web sites utilizing XPath, XSLT, XML Schema, and XML Serialization.
	Extreme XML: Fun with IXMLHttpRequest and RSS Dare Obasanjo shows how to create a Web page that can be used to browse various photo albums on MSN Spaces using IXMLHttpRequest and the RSS feeds provided by MSN Spaces and MSN Search.

Code Samples

Simple Sharing Extensions for Atom and RSS - Javascript Tutorial

This package contains documentation, sample code and xml files that demonstrate working implementations of the algorithms presented in the Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML Specification.