Emanuele DelBono
Software Architect at Managed Design
Published on April 10th, 2006

RSS

Believe it or not, RSS has introduced a revolution in content distribution on Internet.
A snippet of simple and immediate XML code that any program can read and use, that’s it! Simplicity and immediacy: this is the key of its success.

The true history of RSS format is wrapped in a mystery aura and legend. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it seems that the first experiments go back to 1997 (at that time it was called ScriptingNews) but it was in 1999 that Netscape introduced RSS 0.90 that had to be used in my.Netscape.com site, an ancestor of today’s portals.

RSS format has then invaded the Internet and today nearly all the sites that publish some kind of information such as articles, news, sports scores, have an RSS feed which you can download the contents from. Together with all these sources of information, tons of clients were built, the so-called aggregator, that are able to consume RSS Feed and show them to the user nearly like e-mail messages.

The big advantage of subscribing an RSS feed is the ability to display only the information you asked for, because the aggregator filters noises introduced from flash animations, banners etc. and focuses the attention only on the contents that really matter.

All new Microsoft products will be RSS-aware, with full built-in support to this format: as an example, Internet Explorer 7 automatically detects RSS feeds on the current page and allows you to preview and optionally to subscribe to the RSS feed making with just a single click.

But Microsoft will go beyond this: the features given by IE7 to the users will be available for the developers too, because they are integrated within the Windows Vista operating system: the brand new OS will supply to all RSS-hungry applications a bunch of APIs that will enable the application to access a central repository for all the user’s feeds.
Microsoft 2007 Office release will have full support for the RSS feed too, and Outlook 2007 will become the excellence aggregator giving the user the ability to subscribe to feeds, to organize them in folders, to search through the items, and to be notified for the new items.

But we cannot talk about RSS without mentioning the blog phenomenon: raise the hand who does not have a blog, or who has not tried to open one even just to give a try. Tens of free platforms are available in order to create a blog space and to start to blog about soccer, kitchen, programming, music, etc.
Blogs have changed the way the informations do spread onto the Internet, and empowered anyone with the ability to write, to potentially reach everyone and even to become and famous; they put on the same status the professional journalists and the simple passionate about a topic.

And what for us? For developers the great thing is to come in direct contact with people who build our tools, because we can read the blog of the program managers of Visual Studio who has given us precious information. In addition the fact of being able to leave a feedback, shiny advice and to read their answer has been for many of us like touching the sky. Microsoft has an official site (http://blogs.msdn.com) on which the members of the several developer teams post news, information, tips, ask councils, and tell us what is happening inside Microsoft.
So come on! If you don’t have already a blog now it is the time to get one.