RSS Feeder.Net 3 (Open Source C# RSS and Blog Posting Project)

The Code Project - RSS Feed Aggregator and Blogging Smart Client - Smart Client

"RSS Feeder.NET is a free open source desktop RSS feed aggregator which downloads feeds from web sources and stores locally for offline viewing, searching and processing. It is also a rich blogging tool which you can use to blog to variety of blog engines including WordPress, B2Evolution, .Text, Community Server etc. You can be fully MS Outlook dependent or can run fully standalone. You can also use both at the same time whichever you find comfortable to work with. It does not increase Outlook load time, nor does it make Outlook slow frequently or prevent from closing properly. It is a Smart Client that makes best use of both Local Resource and Distributed Web Information sources.

Features:

• Newspaper mode. You can read feeds in a more readable newspaper mode called “Blogpaper”.
  
• Auto Discovery. Drag any hyper link and I will find out whether there is any RSS Feed in that page
  
• Outlook integration. You can store feeds in Outlook folders
  
• Blogging. It provides you a Outlook 2003 style convenient workspace to manage your blog accounts and write rich posts
  
• Blog from Outlook. You can specify an Outlook folder for a weblog account. All the posts from that folder is automatically posted to the weblog during synchronization. You can write posts as HTML using Word editor. Post content (HTML markup) is cleaned rigorously before posting to the weblog.
  
• Outlook View. It uses a customized view to present a more readable list of feeds in Outlook Folders. The standard Post view is not easy to browse through quickly. The view puts the subject first in bold and an excerpt of the post under the subject.
  
• Optimized Startup. You can safely put RSS Feeder at startup and it won’t make your Windows® start slower. A clever lazy loading process puts no effort on Windows® during startup instead starts the app when Windows® has finally regained its strength after the long boot up struggle.
  
• Newsgator Import. Newsgator users can use RSS Feeder to import all the subscriptions and seamlessly replace Newsgator without any modification to Outlook folder locations.

..."

There are some interesting features in this RSS Reader/Blogging tool. I want to take a look at the "lazy loading" and see what that is all about... It sounds pretty cool. (Looks like he's using a VB6 proxy to launch the app after a 5 minute delay. Kind of a "Run at Startup, but wait a bit before you REALLY Startup")

Also I like the optional Outlook integration. Sounds like it lets the user decide if they want it in Outlook or not. I always dig giving the user the power to decide how they use an app.

You can be fully MS Outlook dependent or can run fully standalone or can use both at the same time. It does NOT increase Outlook load time, make it slow frequently, prevent Outlook from closing properly.

The blog posting feature also looks pretty cool.

The Code Project article is pretty long, in-depth and well written. It's a great read in and of itself on smart client development with web service integration.

He shows how he also plays memory set games to try and lower the memory used by this .Net App. That's interesting... I don't think I've seen that before...

.NET Winforms apps are memory hog apps. An innocent one button, one form application takes 15 to 20 MB memory when it loads, where a VB 6 counter part takes 15 to 20 KB.

However, if you open Task Manager while RSS Feeder is in the tray and no window is visible, you will notice that it takes only around 3 to 5 MB memory.

This is done by reducing the WorkingSet of the Process of the app. WorkingSet is a property of the Process class which contains how much memory the process is consuming. Interesting thing is, it is not a read-only variable, you can increase or decrease it too. If you try to decrease it, you will notice the memory usage goes down significantly. Although it does not work always, but we can give it a try whenever we like.


Overall this is a very interesting application and one I'm going to be looking more closely at...