Sunday, February 06, 2011

Reading RSS items on Windows Phone 7

Following is a utility class I wrote to help me read RSS items asynchronously on a Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 application.

I will present how it was written and then how to use it. At the end of this post you can find a sample application that contains all the code.

How to read RSS?

Add Helper Assembly

The first thing we need to do is to add a reference to the assembly, System.ServiceModel.Syndication.dll which contains classes that can parse RSS feeds.
This assembly is part of the Silverlight 3 SDK. It isn’t part of the Windows Phone 7 SDK, but there is no problem in using it there. You can find the file under:

%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft SDKs\Silverlight\v3.0\Libraries\Client\System.ServiceModel.Syndication.dll