RSS Tool-kit and RSS Data Source

Posted Tuesday, March 7, 2006 2:47 PM by C-Dog's .NET Tip of the Day

Ok, well it's been a while since I have posted but now that I am back from vacation and everything, I should be providing more content reguarly.

Not to just regurgitate stuff from Scott's blog, but I figured some of you might find this useful for your own sites and what not. There is a new RSS Tool-Kit that includes an RSS datasource that allows you to do data binding just to GridViews, Repeaters, etc, just like you could with a SqlDataSource or ObjectDataSource. You can do binding in the wizard with it and everything. It's definitely a great way to integrate RSS feeds into your site and easily format them the way you want.

On top of that it supports caching and everything. The cache settings are of course configurable. I was thinking about writing something like this myself just today, but alas it looks like someone beat me to it. The source code is also provided if you have any need to extend it.

This is what the markup would look like to bind to a feed.

<asp:DataList ID="MyDataList" DataSourceID="MyRssDataSource"  runat="server">
<ItemTemplate>
     <asp:HyperLink runat="server" 
NavigateUrl='<%# Eval("link") %>' 
Text='<%# Eval("title") %>'>
</asp:HyperLink>
   </ItemTemplate>
</asp:DataList>
  <RssToolKit:RssDataSource id="MyRssDataSource" runat="server" 
url="http://www.dotnettipoftheday.com/rss.aspx">
</RssToolkit:RssDataSource>

RSS Tool-Kit

Read the complete post at http://www.dotnettipoftheday.com/blog.aspx?id=257