Building a RSS aggregator using LINQ to Objects and WCF 3.5

Okay, so you read the title of this post. Perhaps you're expecting huge amounts of code, but guess what. As it turns out, this is so ridiculously easy. This will be a very short post.

Step one is to have a method that loads an RSS feed. WCF offers a new class called SyndicationFeed.

private SyndicationFeed Load( string url )

{

  XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create( url );

  SyndicationFeed feed = SyndicationFeed.Load( reader );

  return feed;

}

The above method will take a url and use to load a feed. Now suppose I have a list of urls and I want to take all the items in all the feeds, sort them and use them to generate a new, aggregated feed. Sounds like a fair amount of work, right.

Here is the code:

private SyndicationFeed Aggregate( List<string> urls )

{

  var items = from url in urls

              from item in Load( url ).Items

              orderby item.PublishDate descending

              select item;

  SyndicationFeed feed = new SyndicationFeed( items );

  return feed;

}

Cool!