Small things are sometimes the most useful...

Windows Vista has a new set of API for working with RSS feeds. I don't mean to imply that this is a 'small' thing, since I'm sure it was a lot of work to create this.

Before Vista, there were lots of different ways of consuming a RSS feed - anything from a community .NET project to opening up a socket and parsing yourself.

But, what I really like about the built-in support for RSS that Windows Vista provides is exactly that, it's built-in :) All of the hassles of figuring out a folder structure, creating a data store, providing sync and async ways of downloading content and downloading content at a regular interval have been figured out and implemented. Not rocket science per say, but the devil is in the details, so it's nice to have all of this functionality ready and wait for you as a developer.

I made another 'highlights' style video about this feature and posted it to Screencast.com, check it out if you have a chance.

Thanks!

Eric.