A friend of mine mailed me yesterday saying that he remembered that I had showed him a way of generating an RSS feed easily from an ASP.NET page. I pointed him at an old blog post that I wrote a couple of years back.

However, I remembered after sending him the link that I had actually re-coded that whole page to make use of a feature in the .NET library that is made for exactly the task of creating syndication feeds.

So here’s a code snippet that does basically the same thing as the old way, but does it all in C# (which means you could throw it in a HttpHandler and let it handle requests for *.rss or *.xml files :-))

public void ShoutBox()
{
    Response.Buffer = false;
    Response.Clear();
    Response.ContentType = "application/xml";

    using (XmlWriter writer = XmlWriter.Create(Response.OutputStream))
    {
        SyndicationFeed feed = new SyndicationFeed("mrfs.se: Shouts",
                                               "Malmö Radioflygsällskaps Shoutbox",
                                               new Uri("http://www.mrfs.se"));
        feed.Authors.Add(new SyndicationPerson("webmaster@mrfs.se", "MRFS Webmaster", "http://www.mrfs.se"));
        feed.Categories.Add(new SyndicationCategory("Shouts"));
        feed.Copyright = new TextSyndicationContent("Copyright © 2009 Malmö Radioflygsällskap");
        feed.Generator = "Graffen's RSS Generator";
        feed.Language = "se-SE";

        List<SyndicationItem> items = new List<SyndicationItem>();
        foreach (var shout in r.GetShouts(20))
        {

            SyndicationItem item = new SyndicationItem();
            item.Id = shout.ShoutDate + ":" + shout.ShoutedBy;
            item.Title = TextSyndicationContent.CreatePlaintextContent(shout.ShoutedBy);
            item.Content = TextSyndicationContent.CreateXhtmlContent(shout.ShoutText);
            item.PublishDate = shout.ShoutDate;
            item.Categories.Add(new SyndicationCategory("Shouts"));

            items.Add(item);
        }
        feed.Items = items;
        Rss20FeedFormatter rssFormatter = new Rss20FeedFormatter(feed);
        if (writer != null)
        {
            rssFormatter.WriteTo(writer);
            writer.Flush();
        }
    }
    Response.End();
}