Today, I was out Googling for a good ATOM library to add to a project I am working on so I can support both RSS & ATOM. Thus far, I have been using the excellent ASP.NET RSS Toolkit, but I was disappointed to find very few .NET solutions for ATOM available in the open-source community.
The ATOM.NET (& RSS.NET) libraries appear to nolonger be actively supported/developed. As a result, ATOM.NET still only supports ATOM v0.3. This pretty much renders it useless for general use since Blogger and many other services have shifted everything to ATOM v1.0.
I found another interesting library, Atomizer, on GotDotNet but it contained a lot of unneccessary tangential code and inexplicably adhered to the "put-all-twenty-classes-in-one-file" methodology which made sifting and filtering the chaffe a bit more annoying.
Seeing as how GotDotNet is being eliminated I thought it wise to forego projects on there anyhow, so I decided to check out its chosen successor; CodePlex. I did a quick search for "ATOM" which came up with 2 likely hits; Feed Library, and WebFeedFactory.
Feed Library said all the right things;
Feed Library is a .net library written in c# to allow reading, creation, manipulation popular feeds (rss and atom) with common, easy to use api.
Expect initial release somewhere in the middle of spring.
For now, I'm collecting ideas, feature requests and applications from people that may help.
Ufortunately that's all there is too that project - just text. There is no source code & no releases! Oh well, I'll bookmark that one and maybe check back in a few months to see where it goes.
The WebFeedFactory actually had source-code AND text:
The goal of this project is to create a reusable library for parsing both Atom and RSS feeds and provide a common interface for working with either type of feed.
I loved what it said, and the code looked promising, eventhough it too had not been updated in a while and lacked ATOM 1.0 support. However, the kiss of death was when I saw that it was GPL'd. Game over, bye bye now.
So, my journey continued...
I began pulling down numerous libraries packaged as articleware, blogsamplings, and even a few commercial products. Most were the usual glut of StrongTypedXmlDom implementations, or suffered from XmlSerialization disorder. Finally, I discovered Brian Kuhn's Argotic Web Content Syndication library.
Argotic appears full featured, thoughtfully composed, extensible, permissively licensed...and, most importantly, free! It even supports almost every known RSS extension including ITunes. The only downside I can see so far is that it is apparrently "closed-source" since only binaries are available on the website. I think I'll go ahead and play with his API a bit before deciding whether or not its worthwhile to persue the elusive sourcecode.
I'm not sure if its what I'm looking for, but it looks damn close.
While I continue to search for ATOMtopia, please leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a good, simple, and preferably free (opensource) library - or at least tell me what you use.
I just discovered this promising project named RSBuild on CodePlex for scripting the deploy of Stored Procedures & Sql Reporting artifacts.
RSBuild is a deployment tool for SQL Server Reporting Service. It currently supports two types of tasks: executing SQL Server scripts and publishing SQL Server Reporting Serivce reports and shared data sources.
- It uses ADO.NET to execute database scripts in batch. Database script can be specified in the configuration file with specific database connection. (This tool can be extended to support other database provider)
- To publish reports and data sources to SQL Server Reporting Services, it uses the generic web service interface provided by SQL Server Reporting Services. By specifying data sources and report files in the configuration file, it will publish them to the designated location on the report server.
Besdes the simple command-line interface, the thing I liked most about it is that it isnt just the typical MSBuild wrapper to OSQL.exe and RS.EXE. Instead it uses ADO.NET and wrappers to the Reporting Services management web services.
Since it is open source, I think I'll try and modify it to address a problem that often prevents me from using Microsoft's deploy tool. The RS.EXE tool that ships with Sql Reporting does not support custom security extensions such as Forms Auth and there is currently no work around other than writing your own replacement for the tool.