Roadmap of SyndicationFeed

SyndicationFeed on .NET Core

While we are making System.ServiceModel.Syndication available on .NET Core, we are also looking into improvements in following areas.

• Custom Parsers SyndicationFeed will have a default parser for RSS and Atom feeds, but now we will give users the opportunity to use their own parsing function for the known types, for example, if a user knows s/he is going to use an exact date format which might not be supported by the default date parser, the user will be able to override the default parser with her/his own code.

• Date Parsing Many users have experienced that the original parser failed to parse some exact date formats, the default date parser will be improved to support more date formats.

• Optional Items in RSS/ATOM spec There are currently some optional items that the feed object model doesn’t have. We plan to add them and make the user’s interaction with the object easier.

• Async support Current APIs to read/write a SyndicationFeed document are synchronous. A thread will be blocked until the whole document is read/written. These APIs will be changed to be asynchronous so a thread will not be blocked for I/O anymore. When the asynchronous call returns, a user has full document for further operation. Update (12/15/2017): After a lot of prototyping and testing, we found it was hard to provide async support while maintaining high compatibility with full .NET Framework. Since the main goal of this library is to provide compatibility so your libraries built on full .NET Framework can just work on .NET Core with little/no changes, we decide not to support async in this library. We recommend to use the new Microsoft.SyndicationFeed.ReaderWriter library, which has async design in mind from the beginning.

A new syndication feed

While we are improving on the existing SyndicationFeed, which gives users best compatibility for porting existing code from .NET Framework to .NET Core, we are investing in a new syndication feed reader/writer, which is expected to suit better for modern programming when users are writing new code.

• New syndication feed reader/writer Unlike the async support for existing SyndicationFeed where an async call will not return until the whole document is read/written. A new syndication feed reader/writer will support reading/writing on demand. It does not save the whole content in memory and it only reads/writes forward (similar to the concept of XML reader). The new feed reader/writer will have graceful error handling, extensibility model and other improvements we have been doing for the existing SyndicationFeed. It will be a separate package that will give maximum flexibility to users (eg. migrating existing code vs. writing new code).

Feedback

Both the improved SyndicationFeed and the new syndication feed reader/writer will be built on .NET Standard so they can be used anywhere .NET Standard is supported (yes, you can even use them on full .NET Framework). Both projects are still working in progress, but we’d love to hear what you think as your feedback is crucial for us to make it right for you.

[zhenlan]

@lviana1 thanks for the question and additional information. Our plan is to support RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0.

I am excited to announce that we just released a preview of Microsoft.SyndicationFeed on nuget.org. Here is a bit instructions and examples to get you started. We are eager to hear your feedback. Please let us know how it works for you.

[drago-draganov]

Here is a quick update plan for the next week

• We are renaming Microsoft.SyndicationFeed to Microsoft.SyndicationFeed.ReaderWriter
• The project will be moved to own GitHub repository: /dotnet/SyndicationFeedReaderWriter
• Release of updated NuGet package