The RSS platform in Windows Vista...

Amar Gandhi, a Group Program Manager on the Internet Explorer team and a general RSS evangelist, had a great session today describing the RSS platform in Windows Vista and explaining how developers can leverage the capabilities built into the system to rapidly build RSS-enabled applications. The session was very interactive and well presented.



The overall architecture of the RSS platform in Vista consists of three general layers - the service, the RSS store itself, and the API's that can be used to leverage the platform. One significant aspect of the sync/download engine, which synchronizes the contents of feeds and associated enclosures with the server, is that it makes use of BITS - the Background Intelligent Transfer Service, just like Automatic Update does today. The advantage of this is that it uses network resources intelligently. If the user is making use of his/her connection, the sync engine throttles down so that it doesn't interrupt the user's primary activities.

The service then condenses all types of feeds - RSS 0.9x, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom - into a single format (based on RSS 2.0) for internal purposes. This makes it easy for application developers using the API's to consume the feed in their apps without having to worry about the differences berween the various formats.

Coming to the API's themselves - they're actually pretty powerful and, at the same time, very simple to use. Although they're made available as a COM object (so as to prevent any forced dependencies on the CLR), the format and conventions used in the API's follow the .NET model, making it easy for .NET developers to work with them. Amar showed us some great examples of how one can write RSS-enabled applications using a minimal amount of code:

- A photo screensaver that dynamically populates itself with images from a photo-blog feed.
- An application that extracts the enclosures from the Channel9 video feed, builds a playlist out of them, and automatically adds the playlist to WMP10.
- An application that pulls events from the PDC schedule and adds them to the Outlook calendar.

I approached Amar after the session and asked him if he could post the code samples from the session on the Team RSS blog, and he readily agreed to do so. I'm guessing it should be up within the next few days, so take a look if you're curious to see how apps can take advantage of the RSS platform in Vista.

On a related note, here's an image of what the RSS implementation in IE7 is probably going to look like in the new build that's being released next month. Notice the ability to sort feed items by custom types/categories ("Speaker" in this case). Also notice how feed items can be grouped into one or more custom categories (Session Type and Level in this case).



Beta 2 of IE 7 is then expected to ship in December this year.

Tags: Vista, Longhorn, RSS, IE7, PDC05