ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

Roy, I had this *exact* experience about 2 weeks ago: I installed RssBandit and thought "COOL!"; the UI is very nice... alas my experience was similar to yours and I immediately turned back to SharpReader. Let's hope that the performance issues do get fixed :-)

Or let's hope SharpReader gets those features you expect ;-)

Agreed! I've tried both RSSBandit and FeedDemon and it dawned on me that sometimes simplicity is best. Bandit is chock full of features yet using SharpReader just feels "right". It's fast and intuitive, so what more do I want? :-)

I've tried at least 3 different versions of RSS Bandit and none of them have worked at all. The first few failed and gave me some strange error (it was a while ago, so I don/t remember the exact error), the latest version chokes on the first feed I tried it with (yours, by the way) but SharpReader has never given me any trouble. I can't really compare the 2 because I can't really say that I've actually been able to use RSS Bandit at all.

I have to say I had exactly the same experience Roy. I really wanted to use RSS Bandit but it just doesn't work right. I am seriously considering NewsGator.

Thanks for the feedback. I played with the thread pool count in the current build and changed the way downloading comments works to a background task. However there is one of your complaints I don't think is possible to feasibly address.

>Every time I try to use it, and import my 250-300 feed opml into it, it starts choking and the GUI hangs.

I just tried importing 144 feeds (Joshua Allen's list of Microsoft bloggers) into both RSS Bandit & SharpReader and they both ended up being similarly sluggish which is unsurprising given that they are attempting to download almost 150 files at once which is a lot regardless of how many threads you have working in the background. I'm not surprised that the behavior is worse at 250-300 feeds. You probably never notice the fact that SharpReader has similar problems with this because you've never tried to import 250-350 brand new but instead done a "Refresh" on 250-300 feeds which isn't the same thing since a lot of those feeds will probably send 304s instead of requiring downloading.

There is a problem that clicking a category node takes several seconds to show all the items under it. This is one of the consequences of what I'd like to call "Too much code reuse". I'll fix this tonight and the performance should be a lot better.

I'll probably let out a perf improved release tonight or tomorrow morning.

Thanks again for the feedback.

Well I just tried the latest version RSS Bandit again after a glowing review on another blog... It was just unusable. SharpReader just works, and that's the most important thing.

And I just switched from Sharpreader to RSSBandit and it wend smooth enough. Besides what would hold you from helping to debug?

I disagree. I have loaded an OPML with 230 feeds into SharpReader without encoutering the same issues. It may not load all the posts very quickly, but I never lose control of the UI. I can click on a category immediately and begin reading while the feeds are refreshing.

I had similar problems with FeedDemon too.

I was a long-time (3 mths+) user of RSS Bandit and have had to make the switch to Sharp Reader as well. Apart from an annoying message that started coming up whenever I open Bandit (I have posted to the bug tracker at http://www.gotdotnet.com/Community/Workspaces/BugDetails.aspx?bugid=4615), some of my feeds were *never* being updated. If I deleted them and re-added the feed it would update fine. Anyway, I have changed to SharpReader and never looked back. All my feeds are now being updated.