Then Aggie brought me some information on Newswire, which sounds cool. The problem is that it may be too high tech to get adopted (sad isn't it), and it's not clear how they intend to distribute Newswire itself.

If RSS really takes off, then it seems like RSS notification of some kind is necessary. Then again, I'd be happy if someone just dumped rss items into an inbox that was hooked to my aggregator (spam excepted, of course -- which I guess is why this can't work, sigh). The other problem with e-mail and push-like solutions is the centralization aspect of it. If I rely on the blogs I read to remember that I read them, then if they crash and loose the subscription list, I might never find out (unless they are one of the top-tier daily bloggers). Newswire does sound cool.

Did anybody notice that the Chandler 0.1 build has an RSS aggregator built in? And that this parcel was written by a non-programmer using Mark Pilgrim's ultraliberal RSS parser? Chandler has a long way to go, but this is encouraging.

On the tooling side, I've only played with Visual Studio a little bit (I'll be doing more) but right now it seems to me that Eclipse is a more powerful environment for people doing straight coding. I haven't gotten to the ASP.NET tools or the database tools in VS.NET yet, so I'll have to report back on that later. And since the IntelliJ people are always crowing about how IntelliJ's UI is far beyond Eclipse, that makes 2 IDE's for Java that are a parity or beyond VS.NET. As far as command line tools go, all I can say about that is that Ant was on Java before NAnt came along. As I read the .NET weblogs, I see references to some other interesting sounding stuff -- XSD Inference, etc. There must be some place that someone like me can go to learn about all this stuff. Maybe some of those folks that have recently swallowed the Red Pill will be able to do something to help out. I'm really interested in the whole Mono situation, and it appears that the tools story there is pretty much Emacs/vi, etc. Tools like SharpDevelop only seem to run on Windows. Maybe that will change once Gtk# or SWT# mature, or when someone decided to do a C# version of JDT in Eclipse.

I haven't had time to dig into the class libraries yet, but I've seen some interesting articles recently...

• Jan Tielens tells How to get a RSS feed in a DataSet in 1 line...

  With only one line of code, you can get the contents of a RSS feed into a DataSet:
  myDataSet.ReadXml(New IO.StreamReader(System.Net.WebRequest.Create("http://msdn.microsoft.com/rss.xml").GetResponse.GetResponseStream)

  I know that this is VB code, but I think that you can call all of this from C# in an ASP.NET page. I'm not aware of anything like this in Java.

• Julie Lerman describes how the CLR handles date/time formatting, something which has bitten me in pyblosxom because the default time data type isn't ISO8601 compliant which means that it's hard for us to generate RSS 2.0 valid feeds using the builtin libraries. My own code calls out to pyXML to get the job done, but this is causing a problem for people whose ISP's havent' installed pyXML on their webservers.

  Brad Abrams follows up Julie's post with a code sample.

• Simon Fell gets into the act by describing a pair of functions that make it easy to do ETag handling for an RSS feed.