The Moth

The RSS story varies depending on whether you are a publisher, end user or consumer developer. While almost everyone I ask is an end user (via a browser or a rich client aggregator) and many are producers (most commonly blog authors like myself), very few are developers that programmatically consume RSS today. My bet is that this will change going forward with the advent of the Windows RSS Platform.

The Windows RSS Platform ships with IE7 and hence is available not only with Vista but on WinXP too.

It has several elements:
1. Background Download component
2. Common Feed List
3. Store of feed items
4. Store of enclosures (think attachments, e.g. think podcasts)
5. RSS Object Model (more on the API in a later post)

Applications running on Windows have a choice as to which of these components they want to use - in other words it is not an all or nothing approach. For example IE7 uses the lot while Outlook 2007 optionally uses the Common Feed List (more on O12 later).

I am not going to drill into any of the above since there are mountains of information out there. Below are some links to get you started:

- The BTB033 session at Mix06
(also, if you can get hold of the PDC2005 material, check out the session on 'RSS in Windows Vista' again by Walter vonKoch - that was a clue as to who you should send any feedback that you have)

- A handful of overviews on MSDN

- An older article on MSDN

- RSS platform on the RSS Team blog