Chapter 10. Adding an RSS Feed

A nice feature in the CSK is the ability to add content to a community via a Web Service Box. The Web Service Box can retrieve content from other communities through a web service call, or from a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) document retrieved over the network. However, the CSK did not ship with the ability to expose content through RSS. The RSS feed is an attractive option to many community members who would like to know when new content arrives on the site without browsing to the site or checking e-mail. Instead, the user’s news aggregator software will periodically scan an RSS feed to retrieve content and alert the user when new items are available.

With RSS and weblogs (blogs) growing in popularity, RSS would be a good feature to have in the CSK. In this chapter, we will take a look at implementing an RSS 2.0 feed. We will need to make some changes to the core of the CSK—the HttpModule— and also develop logic to generate the XML for an RSS feed from an...