Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2

Chapter 10. Syndication Feeds and Silverlight 2

Feed syndication has grown in availability as a web service. Many websites are now publishing their content as RSS or Atom feeds to provide news, press releases, sports updates, and other timely information. Syndicated information is just another form of data in the cloud that is available to be consumed. Instead of being provided through REST or SOAP, each feed gets a unique URI that returns a stream of XML containing the feed items using the popular RSS or Atom format.

Silverlight 2 includes several features that allow it to consume, manipulate, and display syndicated feeds. Feeds can be requested using WebClient or HttpWebRequest, the feed contents can be read and manipulated using XmlReader, LINQ to XML, or the SyndicationFeed class, and the results can be bound to Silverlight 2 target controls. There are several ways to work with feeds from Silverlight 2, each with its pros and cons. Because feeds are simply a web service, you must take cross-domain policy issues into consideration, as well. If a cross-domain policy is not available, services such as FeedBurner, Popfly, and Yahoo! Pipes offer valid alternatives. This chapter discusses the options, demonstrates the techniques for working with syndicated feeds, and provides solutions for working around some of the common pitfalls.

Syndicated Feeds

Silverlight 2 has syndication support for retrieving and processing feeds using the Atom and RSS protocols. Processing syndicated feeds ...