Now You Can Listen to Podcasts Easier With This Cool New WPF Application

Josh Smith is a busy bee. If you don't know Josh yet you're going to like him because he is a prolific contributor to the .NET community. I'm not kidding - Josh boasts 40 Code Project articles, a blog and other community projects! (Josh, please let me know if you are ready to start that new hobby.)

Josh's latest work is an article series over on Code Project that will teach you how to build a podcast aggregator in WPF.

The WPF Podcatcher Series - Part 1 (Introducing Podder)

What's even better than playing tour-guide around some pretty hefty technology - what Josh is building is a great utility to consume podcasts too.

While it's still a work-in-progress there are some features already in there that make it worth checking out. My favorite features (so far) are:

• Lightening Fast Playback: I would love to give Josh all the credit for this one, but the WPF media player is able to read MP3s as if they are streamed from most servers. This makes for a great user experience of not having to download the entire file before listening to the show. This thing is so slick you can immediately seek through the most files!
  
  
• Favorites: You can mark episodes as "favorites" which will build a filtered view of shows in a feed. Want to hear all that Jeff Palermo has to say about MVC? Mark his appearances on Polymorphic Podcast, the ASP.NET Podcast and .NET Rocks! as favorites and then you have each of those episodes available in one simple location.
  
  
• Auto Load Polymorphic Podcast: Well at least the build I got from Josh had my show's feed auto-loaded. Maybe that's just for me though :) Josh is kind enough to let me meddle in his project by providing feedback and suggestions. I am having a blast seeing this project mature.
  
  

Like he says in his article, he's beginning a series so we can expect a lot more from this series in the near future.