Is anybody besides me becoming an RSS junkie? Actually, that was a loaded question as it seems to be affecting many people. As part of the upcoming Mobility Day I’ve been putting together a variety of different samples to show. I started doing a simple feed reader to show some concepts of the Compact Framework, ADO and XML usage. It quickly became much more and finally evolved into a quite useful application. When I combined this application with my recent OS upgrade and the T-Mobile all you can eat data plan for my Pocket PC Phone, I was completely hooked. Both I and several others have been testing it over the last week and have given very positive feedback. I wanted to open it up to others and hope that they will use it and provide some feedback. What do you like? What do you hate? What do you want?

I designed the interface to take advantage of several different areas of the Compact Framework. I definitely ran into some of the short comings of the Compact Framework. The good news is that these are being added in 2.0. The most important problem was rendering HTML within my application. Well no worries, the folks at OpenNETCF solved that problem. Definitely, have some great stuff!

I wanted to do a quick introduction to News Reader an RSS reader written entirely using the Compact Framework 1.0.

Here is the startup screen

Here is the Read screen

Here is the message screen

Here is a short list of some of the features that I wanted to highlight

1. Maintains the last download date for feeds.
2. Maintains a local XML file with your posts.
3. Allows the deletion of individual messages or an entire feed.
4. Automatic retrieval of feed information based on an RSS URL.
5. Multiple feed retrieval based on selection
6. Able to consume both RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds.
7. Maintains the local feed list using OPML

Please feel free to download the following files and let me know your feedback, bugs or comments that you may have.

Here are the links for download:

Pocket PC/Pocket PC Phone (Complete package)

Other CAB Files (CABs only)

OpenNETCF CABS (CABs only)

Installation instructions:

1. Extract the device specific zip files into a directory on your local machine.
2. You will need two CAB files. One is for the News Reader application. The second is for the OpenNETCF controls.
3. Copy these two files to your device.
4. Tap the two CAB files. This will install the application and remove the local copies of the CAB files.