RSS Reader using ASP.NET

RSS Feed is very popular in Internet. This tutorial will show you how to create a RSS Reader using ASP.NET 2.0 and C#.

At first, import the namespace of System.Net, System.IO, and System.Xml

In this sample, we created a simple function to process the RSS feed from a sample URL. This function define a string of rssURL as its parameter. This string contains the RSS's URL. It will use the value of rssURL to create a WebRequest.

WebRequest is the abstract base class for the .NET Framework's request/response model for accessing data from the Internet. An application that uses the request/response model can request data from the Internet in a protocol-agnostic manner, in which the application works with instances of the WebRequest class while protocol-specific descendant classes carry out the details of the request.

Requests are sent from an application to a particular URI, such as a Web page on a server. The URI determines the proper descendant class to create from a list of WebRequest descendants registered for the application. WebRequest descendants are typically registered to handle a specific protocol, such as HTTP or FTP, but can be registered to handle a request to a specific server or path on a server.

The response to this request will be put into WebResponse object. The WebResponse class is the abstract base class from which protocol-specific response classes are derived. Applications can participate in request and response transactions in a protocol-agnostic manner using instances of the WebResponse class while protocol-specific classes derived from WebResponse carry out the details of the request. Client applications do not create WebResponse objects directly; they are created by calling the GetResponse method on a WebRequest instance.

After then, the WebResponse object will be used to create a stream to get the XML data. Stream is the abstract base class of all streams. A stream is an abstraction of a sequence of bytes, such as a file, an input/output device, an inter-process communication pipe, or a TCP/IP socket. The Stream class and its derived classes provide a generic view of these different types of input and output, isolating the programmer from the specific details of the operating system and the underlying devices. The we used a XmlDocument to store the stream data. XmlDocument manipulating the data of XML, finally read the RSS contents from Feed.

using System;
using System.Data;

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
//RssDataSource1.Url = "http://blogs.sivababa.org/index.php/category/testimonials/feed";
//Eval("Title").ToString().Length>50 ? Eval("Title").ToString().Substring(0,49)+"..." : Eval("Title").ToString()

lblDate.Text = DateTime.Now.ToString();
}


protected void btnsmt_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if(txtrss.Text=="")
{
lblErrMsg.Text = "Please Rss URL";
return;
}
try
{
object Manifest = Cache.Get("Manifest");
if (Manifest != null)
{
//DataTable dt=new DataTable();
//dt =
Datalistmanifest.DataSource = Cache.Get("Manifest");
Datalistmanifest.DataBind();

}
else
{

RssDataSourceManifest.Url = txtrss.Text.Trim();
RssDataSourceManifest.MaxItems = 5;
DataTable dt = new DataTable();
Datalistmanifest.DataSourceID = "RssDataSourceManifest";
Datalistmanifest.DataBind();
Cache.Insert("Manifest", RssDataSourceManifest, null, DateTime.Now.AddHours(3), TimeSpan.Zero);
}
lblErrMsg.Text = "";
}
catch (Exception)
{
lblErrMsg.Text = "RSS Format is not correct";
}

}
protected void lbtncacheRemove_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
Cache.Remove("Manifest");
}
}

Here I have used the cache to display RSS

Add RssToolkit dll in Bin folder