RSS Platform Beta 3 Changes

  • Article

Jane talked about reading feeds with ease in IE7 Beta 3. I want highlight what is new in the Windows RSS Platform in Beta 3.

With the release of Beta 3, the Windows RSS Platform is now API complete. This means that, barring any serious bug that we must fix, applications written against the Beta 3 API will run unmodified against the final RTM release of the platform.

Since the Beta 2 release we've made the following changes to the RSS Platform:

  1. Added support for updating all feeds: FeedsManager.AsyncSyncAll()
  2. Added support for adding and deleting enclosures from the store. This allows for improved enclosure management and alternate enclosure download outside of the RSS Platform's enclosure download: FeedEnclosure.SetFile() .RemoveFile() and properties .DownloadUrl, .DownloadMimeType
  3. Changed signatures of FeedFolderEvents.FolderItemCountChanged and .FeedItemCountChanged as well as FeedEvents.FeedItemCountChanged.
    They now indicate which item count property has changed, either the item count or the unread item count of a feed or folder
  4. Added FeedItem.Modified to reflect xml element <atom:updated> or <dcterms:modified>
  5. Added FeedItem.Guid to reflect xml element <atom:id> or <guid>
  6. Split the RSS Platform internally-generated XML elements from the Simple List Extension (SLE) namespace "cf" (https://www.microsoft.com/schemas/rss/core/2005) into their own namespace "cfi" (https://www.microsoft.com/schemas/rss/core/2005/internal)
    For example, <cf:read> is now <cfi:read>. This new namespace is reserved for the internal use of the RSS platform, so we remove any elements in the "cfi" namespace from incoming feeds before processing them.
  7. Final API changes based on feedback, including
    1. Proper capitalization of certain properties in the automation/dual interfaces which are used by .NET managed code interop
    2. Additional FEEDS_DOWNLOAD_ERROR's
    3. Renamed Feed.Id to Feed.LocalId
    4. Renamed FeedItem.Id to FeedItem.LocalId

We want to thank the numerous people that provided feedback in blogs, comments, emails and newsgroups posts which resulted in the above changes.

Let me reiterate that we now consider the RSS Platform API complete. We are not planning to change the API. Applications written against the Beta 3 API will run against the final release of the RSS Platform.

Note: We are aware that the MSDN documentation does match the latest API changes. We will update it, but don't have an ETA at this time.

- Walter