Building a User Control that displays RSS feeds
Introduction
Displaying data in
ASP.NET verison 1.x
required writing code to programmatically retrieve the data
and then more code to bind the data to a data Web control,
such as the DataGrid.
ASP.NET 2.0
simplifies the process of working with data through its
data source controls, which allow data to be
retrieved and even modified through declarative means. In
short, ASP.NET 2.0's data source controls permit developers
to work with and display data without having to write a line
of code. For a more thorough look at working with data in
ASP.NET 2.0, be sure to check out my
Accessing and Updating Data in ASP.NET 2.0
article series.
Different data source controls are designed to work with different types of data. The XmlDataSource control, as its name implies, is designed for working with XML data. By setting a few properties, it is possible to retrieve XML data from a remote URL or local file, transform it using XSLT, and filter it using an XPath expression, all without writing a line of code. This data can then be displayed by binding it to a data Web control and XPath databinding statements can be used to bind specific chunks of the resulting XML to other Web controls.
In this article we will see just how easy it is to display
XML data in an ASP.NET 2.0 page. In particular, we will
build a User Control that will display the contents of an
RSS feed. Once created, this User Control can be dragged onto the
Design surface of any ASP.NET page in your project and
configured to display the contents of a particular RSS feed
by simply setting the control's Url property to
the URL of the RSS feed.