July 1, 2010

Announcing the Release of Quick and Dirty Feed Parser

Alternate headline: "never see XML again."

Ok, that may be a bit of a stretch. Regardless, I'm quite pleased to announce the launch of Quick and Dirty Feed Parser, a library for people who want a seamless way to use Atom and RSS feeds in their .NET 2.0+ applications without having to deal with the XML.

"Does the world really need another RSS/Atom parser," you ask? I'll let my source code speak for itself:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using QDFeedParser;

namespace QDFeedParserCMD
{
    class Program
    {
        private static readonly string DefaultFeedUri = "http://www.aaronstannard.com/syndication.axd";

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                string strFeedUri = args.Length == 0 ? DefaultFeedUri 
                    : args[0];

                Uri feeduri = new Uri(strFeedUri);
                IFeedFactory factory = new HttpFeedFactory();
                IFeed feed = factory.CreateFeed(feeduri);

                foreach(var feedItem in feed.Items)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("{0} {1}", feedItem.DatePublished,
                        feedItem.Title);
                    Console.WriteLine(feedItem.Link);
                }
                //Just to prevent the window from instantly bailing out.
                Console.ReadKey(); 
            }
            catch(Exception ex)
            {
                Console.WriteLine("Exception: {0}", ex);
            }

        }
    }
}

That's about as complicated as it gets, folks. And feel free to download this QDFeedParser example from CodePlex. 

I wrote Quick and Dirty Feed Parser largely because I wanted to incorporate a really straightforward RSS/Atom parsing tool into a number of BlogEngine.NET modifications I have in mind in the near future, and I wanted a standard interface for dealing with RSS/Atom feeds that was available to me in .NET 2.0.

Quick and Dirty Feed Parser is my first OSS project so I would love your feedback, contributions, and most awesomely - examples of it actually being used! Check out the QDFeedParser project on CodePlex if you want to get involved!

QD Feed Parser in Action - The Great Wall of Geeks

No project worth it's salt would be complete without some sort of frivolous example, right? Well that's exactly why I created The Great Wall of Geeks.

Feel like your geeky blog belongs on the wall? Leave a comment below!

Discussion, links, and tweets

I'm the CTO and founder of Petabridge, where I'm making distributed programming for .NET developers easy by working on Akka.NET, Phobos, and more..