Saturday, November 08, 2008

My PDC List Maker utility source updated to consume the PDC Channel 9 RSS Feed (resulting in the Keynotes now being included in the list), but fixes, etc.

CodePlex - PDC Resource List Maker

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Just a note to say that I’ve checked in a tweak to my PDC List Maker utility so it now optionally uses the Channel 9 PDC RSS Feed

As you can see in my FUBLY (FUnction But ugLY) UI, there are now there List/Catalog/Data sources. The one I original used, the Channel 9 RSS feed and a version of that feed that I captured/cached today. Of the three, the last is by far the fastest, since there’s no initial catalog download.

This gave me a chance to play with System.ServiceModel.Syndication for the first time. And I have to say, it’s pretty darn cool and easy to use.

But I need to do more R&D into it. The Channel 9 Feed is very complete, with a great list of enclosures (if you look at the raw XML). But when I use the Feed object, I’m only getting the default enclosure. i.e. The Links collection only contains 2 links, the alternate and the default enclosure. I just don’t yet see a way to get the rest of them. Sure I can parse the XML by hand, or via Linq, but first I have to confirm I’m just not being stupid and missing something…

So why am I spending so much time on this? LOL, good question, I have no idea. Okay, that’s a lie… One reason is that I love coding and solving problems and I just don’t get to do that enough in my day life. ;)

 

Update #1 11/8/2008 @ 5:00PM PST:

Yep, I was kind of being stupid. The stuff I was looking for was can be accessed as raw XML via the SyndicationItem.ElementExtensions collection.

For example:
Debug.Print(feed.ElementExtensions(5).GetReader().ReadInnerXml)

So now I’m doing something like this (not quite this lame, but you get the idea);
Dim x As XElement = XElement.Parse(feed.ElementExtensions(5).GetReader().ReadOuterXml)

I’m still playing with this as I don’t think this is the right way to get this data into an XElement. While it works, it smells bad…

 

Related Past Post XRef:
My PDC Video Link List Maker project & source is now available on CodePlex
Another way to get all the PDC Videos… This time as a RSS feed, with WMV videos as an enclosure (i.e. Catch them all for your Zune/IPod)
PDC 2008 Quick Video Link List updated with link verification
PDC2008 Quick Video Link List (Updated: Now with link verification)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I just wrote a WPF based PDC 2008 Video downloader and Viewer. You can access it on my blog at

http://www.dotnetindia.com/2008/11/pdc-2008-video.html