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A quick plug for Mix06 nbsp; it s coming up fast Mar 20 22 , so get registered quickly. In case you missed it, Mix06 is a conference that s focused on Internet technologies so, not surprisingly, RSS will be there in force, with a bunch of sessions that feature RSS fairly prominently. We ll have a session on the Windows RSS Platform, and you ll see aspects of the platform show up in several other sessions and keynotes. The Channel9 team is doing a series of videocasts on the Mix sessions. Check them out. Members of the RSS team will be there for the entire time, so if you re planning on being there and you d like chat, drop us a line. It s in Las Vegas, so how can it not be fun? Sean

John and I have been working on a sample application using the Windows RSS Platform. It s a screen saver which displays the image of RSS posts that have image enclosures. The screen saver is based on the Visual Studio 2005 Screen Saver Starter Kit. We changed it to retrieve images and feed content from the RSS Platform. Here what to do: Install IE7 Beta 2 Preview. Download and install the screen saver. The .msi installer will create a folder in My Documents called MSDN RssScreenSaver with the source code and including documentation. Read the documentation and follow the steps to build the screen saver. Subscribe to photo feeds in IE7 Beta 2 Preview. A simple photo feed is located here. You can also subscribe to flickr feeds. Note: add enc to the format query param to get pictures as enclosures Give it a try and let us know what you think. Walter Update 2 28 06: By request a screenshot of the simple photo feed: nbsp; Update 3 3 06: Sean has posted with a compiled version of the screensaver, so now you don t even need nbsp;Visual Studio to try it out. nbsp; Update 4 5 06: We ve updated the screen saver to work against IE7 Beta 2 Preview release March 20th, 2006. Note the new download link.

Bryan Starbuck from the Windows Live development team blogged about the RSS feed support in Mail Desktop Beta. Their feed reading features are built on top of the Windows RSS Platform. nbsp; That means you can read feeds in an email application that stays in sync with feeds you read in IE7. Go check it out: http: spaces.msn.com morethanmail Note added 5 8 06 : From the comments below, we get a lot of people sending feedback on Windows Live Mail the new Hotmail and Windows Live Mail Desktop the new desktop client . We can t answer those questions. You can send comments on Windows Live Mail team formerly Hotmail at http: spaces.msn.com mailcall .You can send comments to the Windows Live Mail Desktop team at: http: spaces.msn.com morethanmail Both teams would love to hear your feedback directly : Jane

Last summer, at Gnomedex 5.0, we announced the Simple List Extensions SLE , which allow RSS and Atom feeds to be marked up with new tags that allow sorting filtering and what we call list semantics. There s been a lot of feedback from the community and the specification has been updated and posted to a permanent location on MSDN. At Mix06 nbsp;last week, Dean Hachamovitch gave the keynote address on Next Generating Browsing, during which he nbsp;showed off great live examples of feeds that implement the Simple List Extensions, built by Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, and MSN Spaces. AmazonThe Amazon Web Services team did some great work in setting up RSS feeds for wishlists. Just go to amazon.com, find anyone s wishlist and click on the fancy orange icon at the top of the page. Here s a live nbsp;example, and a video nbsp;from Mix06 showing these feeds in action. Jeff Barr posts more details over on the Amazon Web Services blog. eBayIn addition to the feeds from eBay stores that they ve had for a few months, nbsp;eBay is now providing RSS feeds on search results Arturo Zacarias posted the details on the eBay announcements list . The search results and the existing store feeds are SLE enhanced to allow very granular filtering on different categories and filters. This is one of the best examples to date of using the sorting and filtering to their fullest. Pick an item you ve been trying to find and just type it into the search box on ebay.com and subscribe to the feed using the button at the bottom of the page. Yahoo! MusicYahoo! Music has been providing RSS feeds for their Top Songs, Albums and Videos for some time. Now these feeds are enhanced with SLE to provide sorting and filtering controls, as well as to indicating that these feeds are really lists. SLE supporting aggregators will treat these kinds of feeds in the way that the publisher intended as a single entity. We ll post later today about how exactly this list semantic works. Here s a direct link to the Yahoo! Music Top 10 Songs list. Ian Rogers posts more on the Yahoo! Music blog. MSN SpacesThe folks over at MSN Spaces nbsp;quietly added SLE support to all of their feeds earlier this month. Mike Torres blogged about what they ve done. Here s an example using his feed. This really shows how SLE can be used to enhance even blog feeds. nbsp; Needless to say, I m very excited to see RSS used in these cool ways on sites as diverse as these, and I m even more excited to see SLE being used to make these feeds even more useful to users. On a related note, SLE has been getting some other mentions around the blogosphere. Charlie Wood predicts: As more enterprise applications become RSS enabled, I predict that an RSS reader that doesn t support Simple List Extensions will become as retrograde as a web browser that doesn t support tables. I have to say that nbsp;I agree completely : . There s no better way to find out how these Simple List Extensions work than to install IE 7 Beta 2 Preview updated nbsp;March 20 nbsp; check out the cleaner feed view! , and just click on the examples above. They all show off the sorting and filtering features of SLE amazingly well. Thanks to everyone involved in getting these feeds online! Sean

Hey! This is Arvind. I am a Software Design Engineer in Test in the RSS Team working on among other things, the implementation of the Simple List Extensions in IE7 and the Windows RSS Platform. There have been a few posts on RSS in IE7 regarding the user experience, the RSS Platform, and the Simple List Extensions. nbsp; As Sean mentioned in the previous post, there are two parts to the Simple List Extensions: the ability to treat a feed as list and the ability to define customized sorting and filtering functions. I want to go into details about the benefits of using SLE to define a list and how it impacts the user experience and the platform. This is a fairly long post, so I ve split it into 4 parts: the why , the how , what and when about lists! I Why do we need Lists Feeds are used in various applications today. There are news feeds that keep users updated on the latest headlines; blogs that give an insight into experiences; media feeds of photos, audio, and video; travel feeds that provide discounted fares; and commerce feeds on product availability. By subscribing, users can continually get new information and updates to existing items across all of these feeds. nbsp; However, there are cases when outdated items need to be treated differently. Let us take a closer look by comparing two different feeds. a News Feeds Every time a news site publishes new items on its feed, the RSS Platform downloads and adds these new items to the existing store of items which posted earlier by the publisher . The user has the capability to view the recent additions as well as the items published a few days earlier since the RSS platform stores all items for this feed. News feeds and blogs, by their nature, are particularly well suited to archiving. b Lowest Fares Feed from a Travel Agency Now consider a feed from a travel agency of the latest amp; lowest fares available for purchase. nbsp; If you view a travel website, it displays the fares that are relevant for the moment by removing fares that have been sold out or expired and introducing new promotional fares. The website s feed also reflects the relevant fares and remove the outdated ones. When a user is subscribed to the feed, new and updated items in the feed are added to the aggregator s local store. The problem is that the local store reflects a mixture of new, changed, and old items that may be outdated or unavailable. There is no easy way for the user to distinguish the available fares from the unavailable ones. Clicking on an outdated fare may lead to an error that specifies that the Page does not exist. This can confuse the user and can lead to a unusable experience. Detailed example Let s say that a user is subscribed to a travel agent feed on March 18th. nbsp; The live feed is the feed published by the web server on the left, and on the right is the user s subscribed feed that is consumed in a RSS aggregator. By March 21st, there are new fares available on the live feed. nbsp; Also, some of the fares have expired like the trip to Chicago. nbsp; A traditional aggregator adds the new fares but doesn t delete the expired fares. This means that the user now has to distinguish what is expired from the relevant items. nbsp; The problem only gets worse over time. The experience after 3 months of subscribing to the feed results in more outdated items. For these kinds of feeds, a better experience would to see the same data in the aggregator as the feed on the web server live feed . The aggregator should also indicate which items are new since the last time the user viewed the feed. nbsp; In order for a user to benefit from these kinds of feeds, there needs to be a way that a feed publisher can indicate to an aggregator to keep only the relevant information. In the diagram below, we ve gone back to the first update. On the right is a list feed that mirrors the feed on the web server. By subscribing to the list feed, outdated items are removed and new items are marked as new. By having publisher express that their feed is really a list feed, users can gain value of subscribing to these feeds to automatically get new items and interact with only useful data. II How to create a List The Simple List Extension s nbsp; treatAs feature was created for exactly this scenario to allow feed publishers to indicate to an aggregator that only the current set is relevant to the user. nbsp; So, how does one mark a feed as a list? Really simple! Add the lt;cf:treatAs gt;list lt;cf:treatAs gt; tag as a child element of the top level channel or feed nbsp;element. SLE provides a useful feature with minimal developer work and best of all, because its defined in a namespace, if an aggregator doesn t understand the new element, it will ignore it and continue to handle the feed as it normally does the results will be less than ideal, but at least the user will see the data . RSS 2.0 Feed as a List nbsp; nbsp; lt;rss version 2.0 nbsp; xmlns:cf http: www.microsoft.com schemas rss core 2005 gt; nbsp; lt;channel gt; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; lt;cf:treatAs gt;list lt; cf:treatAs gt; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; lt;title gt; Lowest Available Fares today lt; title gt; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; ………. nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; ………. nbsp; lt; channel gt; lt; rss gt; Atom 1.0 Feed as a List lt;feed xmlns http: www.w3.org 2005 Atom nbsp; nbsp;xmlns:cf http: www.microsoft.com schemas rss core 2005 gt; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; lt;cf:treatAs gt;list lt; cf:treatAs gt; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; lt;title gt;Lowest Available Fares today lt; title gt; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp;………. nbsp; nbsp; nbsp;………. nbsp; nbsp; nbsp;………. lt; feed gt; III. How does the RSS Platform and IE feed view behave when viewing a list? Let us look at how the RSS Platform and the IE7 Feed Reading View deal with list feeds. nbsp; The RSS Platform stores all of the items in a feed and on a scheduled basis, it checks the live feed on the website for updates. When it detects a list feed via the presence of the treatAs element , it compares the existing items stored for the feed with the live feed items. If an item in the local feed store is no longer in the live feed, the item in the feed store is removed. If an item in the live feed is new, then it is added to the feed store and marked as unread i.e. it appears new to the user . If an item in the live feed is already in the local feed store, but the content is different than the one stored locally, then the item in the feed store is updated. The RSS Platform also preserves the order of the items exactly as it appears on the live feed. nbsp; In some list feeds like Top 10 Movies the order in which the items appear bear relevance. The user can read feeds in IE7 using the IE Feed Viewer. nbsp; The reading experience for lists is virtually the same as feeds: Items that are updated or new since the last published time are marked as new using a blue color and bolded text. Items that are NOT new are marked as read using a grey color. When a user views the list feed, all items are automatically marked as viewed. The differences the user sees in a list feed that is different from a regular feed are: By default, the items are sorted in order as they appear on the live feed for ordinary feeds, the default is to sort by the date the item was published modified . The user can reverse the sort order, or sort by any other relevant sorting. By default, all items are shown for ordinary feeds, the default is to show only unread items . IV When to use lists Here are some scenarios where list feeds are more appropriate than regular feeds. These applications almost always provide a relevant set of items and don t want the user to see old archived data. 1. Feeds that list the Top N nbsp; nbsp; Examples: The Top 10 Movies of the weekend The Top 10 Expensive Real Estates for the month The 100 most downloaded songs of the week Here are some examples of live Top N feeds that are using SLE today. Yahoo! Music Top Songs Yahoo! Music Top Videos Yahoo! Music Top Albums 2. Feeds that reflect a user s list of things wish lists, bridal registries, todo lists, etc. . Let s take wishlists as an example. Imagine an item the user removed from the wish list because he already received it. If this was a regular feed and was archived, a friend who views this wish list could end up gifting the item the user already has! This is an example of a Amazon wish list using SLE: nbsp;Jeff Bezo s Wish List on Amazon.com. You can make your own and share with your friends and family, too. nbsp; Watch the video here. 3. Feeds of available products For example, an auction site. The feed can contain sellers items with a particular product match. nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; Here s an example of an eBay search for Xbox 360. 4. Lists of open issues The RSS Team is also using list feeds internally to improve the process of tracking active bugs in IE7 during the development process. New bugs get opened and old bugs are resolved every day, and all bugs are stored in a database. When a developer wants to know what bugs to work on, she queries the database. These queries can get slower over time as more people are doing queries. To alleviate this issue and to try out SLE, of course , we created a list feed that lists all the active bugs for each IE7 feature. Every day as the list of bugs changes, the feed updates itself to reflect this new list of bugs. The traffic to the database server is substantially reduced because the database has to be contacted ONLY once to create the Bugs List as opposed to creating a connection with the database every time a user wants to find out the active list of bugs. When developers on the team subscribe to this list feed and view it in IE7 or any other application using the RSS Platform , they see ONLY the relevant active bugs opened against their feature. Using SLE, we have made the process of tracking active issues very simple, fast and scalable. Thanks for reading. nbsp; I m excited to see feeds develop and take form as list feeds. nbsp; If you have any feedback, please leave a comment. Arvind

We ve updated the Publisher s Guide http: blogs.msdn.com rssteam articles PublishersGuide.aspx with how IE7 detects if a file is a feed. nbsp; If you publish feeds, make sure that your site s feed is detected and readable in IE7. If a user browses to a feed though the feed discovery button on the CommandBar, IE7 assumes it is a feed and applies the feed reading view. When a user clicks on a link to a feed, IE7 uses the MIME Content Type information to determine if it is a feed. nbsp; Here is a list of recommended MIME Content Types: RSS 2.0 .91 and .92 : use text xml recommended or application rss xmlAtom 1.0: use application atom xmlRSS 1.0: use application xml or text xml For generic Content Types ex: text xml and application xml IE7 reads the file and looks for specific strings to determine if it is a feed. nbsp; For details, please read the Publisher s Guide. Let us know if there are any issues with our implementation. nbsp; For sites that follow the guidelines but are not properly detected in IE7 Beta 2 Preview, please post the site on our wiki. nbsp; Jane

I wanted to take a couple of minutes to describe how the RSS Platform s download engine works. The behavior can be of interest to feed publishers who might be concerned about scalability as well as to developers and individual users who want to understand how their feeds are being kept up to date. Features that help publishers manage network usage Some of the concerns of feed publishers may have: Number of hits a client will nbsp;hitting the same server many times; update frequencies Traffic spikes many clients hitting the same server at the same time Bandwidth many clients getting large responses from same server; response sizes Let s look at ways in which the RSS Platform addresses these issues. First, number of hits from a given client: Download Schedules Each feed in the Common Feed List has its own update schedule such as every 4 hours, Once a week or Once a day. . The RSS Platform download engine operates in the background while a user is logged in, and checks each feeds for new content on the appropriate schedules. Default and Minimum Intervals As popularity of RSS increases, feed publishers may be concerned about the increasing number of hits they get from aggregators checking for feed updates. The Windows RSS Platform takes a fairly conservative approach and sets the default interval for feeds to 24 hours, meaning that by default each feed will be checked no more than once in a 24 hour period. This frequency might not work for every feed type and the user is able to set a custom interval for each feed. Users can also change the default feed interval. However, in order to avoid accidental overuse of the server bandwidth, the RSS Platform limits the feed interval to a 15 minute minimum, meaning that the RSS Platform download engine will not perform a scheduled background download more frequently then every 15min. It is possible for an application to request an update at any time for example, when the a user clicks the Refresh button or hits F5 in IE7, IE will ask the RSS Platform to update the feed immediately and will then display the results . However, the RSS Platform background download engine will not automatically update more often than 15 minutes. TTL The 15 minute minimum interval might not be large enough for some feed publishers and might still result in too many hits. Or a feed publisher might know that there won t be any updates to their feed for a certain time period and they d like to advise clients to not hit their server more frequently then a specified frequency. The RSS Platform download engine respects RSS 2.0 s nbsp;ttl tag and the nbsp;Syndication extension for both RSS 1.0 and Atom nbsp;by limiting the background downloads to no more often than the publisher specifies. For example, if an RSS 2.0 nbsp;feed has a ttl of 180 minutes specified, the download engine will not check for updates more frequently than every 3 hours, even if the user has set the feed interval to 1hr. Note: as with the case of minimum interval, the user is able to manually refresh a feed more frequently then the 3hour nbsp;ttl defined by the publisher. nbsp; The second major concern that publishers have is with several clients hitting their servers at the same time. Let s look at how the RSS platform helps here. Interval Salting Suppose the RSS Platform download engine were to check for updates for feed A exactly on the hour every hour. Thanks to Internet time servers, client s clocks tend to be fairly well synchronized. Taken togther, this would make nbsp;it likely that many clients would make requests to the feed A at exactly the same time. This would lead to traffic spikes which are expensive at best for servers to handle, since they would need to scale out to handle the peak traffic. In order to minimize the likelihood of severe traffic spikes the RSS Platform introduces a certain amount of randomness to each feed interval this nbsp;is referred to as salting the interval . After each successful download, it sets the next download time of a feed to be the time of successful download plus the interval plus a random fraction of the interval. The effect is that the download time is, in aggregate, spread out over a period of time, so that requests made to the same server from many clients. Error back off interval Assume that a download does not successly complete nbsp;for a particular feed, let s say because of a temporary problem on the server. One approach would be for each client to retry every in a couple of seconds. However, this might make things worse for a server that is already having problems. Over time more and more clients would join the party constantly trying to get updates from the server making it hard for a server recover. Conversely, if the client were to simply mark the download as failed and wait until the next scheduled download time hours or days later , it may miss updates if the error was a transient one. The RSS Platform uses a progressive back off algorithm when there are errors getting a feed. Instead of retrying every couple of seconds, it doubles the retry interval on each iteration. On successive failures the retry interval eventually becomes as large or larger then the normal feed interval, at which point the normal interval will used. nbsp; The final major concern of publishers is with bandwidth usage. The RSS platform implements several of the recommended nbsp;features that will help reduce bandwith on servers nbsp; e.g. see Nick Bradbury s post, or Randy Charles Morin s HowTo . Conditional GETs As mentioned earlier, bandwidth for RSS feeds will be of increasing concern for publishers. In order to help reduce bandwidth the download engine supports Conditional GETs using ETag and If Modified Since HTTP headers. If the feed hasn t been updated at all since the last time the client checked, the server can respond with an HTTP 304 Not Modified response. Delta Encoding In addition to standard conditional GETs the RSS Platform download engine supports Delta Encoding for details, see Bob Wyman s post Using RFC 3229 with Feeds which allows the server to respond with only the feed items that are new or have been updated, thereby possibly reducing the response significantly. Compression gzip encoding Another beneficial feature that the RSS Platform supports is compression. Specifically, the RSS Platform supports gzip encoding of server response bodies which can reduce the response size significantly especially for RSS XML. Automatic unsubscribing Finally, the RSS Platform implements support for the HTTP response 410 Gone . When this response is received, the platform will automatically change the feed s update schedule to Never. So when a feed is shut down, the server can inform clients that the feed is gone, so that they stop polling. That covers the features of the RSS Platform download engine that address feed publishers primary concerns, and provides options on how to best manage the scalability requirements of their servers. Features to help manage client network usage But wait, there s more! nbsp; isn t there always? : If you re a developer or a user, you might be interested to read about some additional features that the Windows RSS Platform has implemented to help minimize bandwidth usage on the client. By default, the RSS Platform background download feature is off for new installations. This means that applications can request manual updates, but otherwise, the content will never be updated. Applications that use the platform should ask the user whether they want background updating, when they first use feed related features or at another appropriate time . Once enabled, the download engine runs in the background whenever the user is logged into Windows. It is important that the download engine does not adversely impact other applications that the user is running at the same time. Since the download engine runs in the background the user typically won t know when it s started up. It would be very frustrating for the user if, all of a sudden, normal browsing or email downloading became slow for no apparent reason. To help reduce the likelihood of this, the RSS Platform download engine implements the following set of features: Parallel Download When the background download engine starts up, it creates a list of all feeds that are ready to be updated. To speed up the process, up to four feeds will be checked in parallel, but no more than that. Too many simultaneous outbound requests might impact foreground Internet usage severely. Throttled requests Once one of the four parallel checks finishes the next feed in the pending list is checked. However, this could lead requests being made in a tight loop which can impact foreground Internet applications. In order to reduce this impact, the download engine throttles the number of requests that will be made in a given time span. The engine uses an algorithm that works by gives the engine a token once per second up to a maximum of 4 tokens that it can store up . If it has a stored up token then it can make the next request. So assuming that requests finish quickly, then in steady state it will make a new request once per second but not more frequently. Obviously, if it has more then one token stored up due to a feed taking a while to download then it can burst and make multiple requests but only up to the max of 4. nbsp; I hope that this overview of some of the features of the Windows RSS Platform download engine provides some information for feed publishers as well as developers and curious users that are interested in how the download engine works, and what impact it may have on the overall network as well client performance. Even more… The inquisitive mind will rightly point out: Hey Walter, you haven t talked about download of enclosures! You are correct. I will cover the details of enclosure download by the RSS Platform in a future post. If you have any particular questions about enclosure download you d like to see answered, let me know in the comments. Walter

I, for one, am very excited to have Niall Kennedy join the Windows Live team and drive the development of an RSS platform. For one thing, it s nbsp;great to have someone with a voice that is as well respected as his joining Microsoft in any capacity. Just last month, at Etech, Jane Kim nbsp;joined Niall onstage for his session on Feeds as a platform, where she talked about the principles behind why we are building a shared central platform for feed syndication into Windows. It was clear then and from his excellent writeups on the topic that he deeply understood the value of feed platforms. More generally, it is great to have Windows Live focusing on building an online RSS platform. I have long believed that integration between online services and clients enables far richer experiences than either one alone in fact, a key goal of our own Windows RSS platform is to make it super easy for a client developer to integrate online content and services nbsp;into their application . nbsp; On a related topic, I will go out on a limb and say that I can be nbsp;a bit of a NewsGator fanboy. I ve been a NewsGator Outlook Edition Inbox user for years though these days, I admit, I feel compelled to use IE7 s feed reader : The synchronization support between the RSS platform and NewsGator Online that Greg showed off at Mix06 is just awesome. Greg and the NewsGator nbsp;team demonstrate exactly what I love about integration between clients and services combining to deliver a great service that makes them both that much better. In short, there is no end to the cool things that services enable, both the Windows Live ones and the ones done by folks like Greg and his team. Sean

Not too long ago I gave a talk titled Using the RSS Platform on Windows: Syndication Goes Mainstream at Mix06 in Las Vegas. While my talk was at 8:30am on the last day of the conference and mind you it was in Vegas it was much better attended then I could have hoped. During Mix06 attendees had seen and heard quite a bit about the Windows RSS Platform and RSS functionality in IE7. Bill Gates and Dean Hachamovitch talked about both in their keynote speeches. Instead of repeating things, I focused on how to actually make those things work, how web developers can take advantage of feed discovery, sorting and filtering, and lists part of the Simple List Extensions today. For those of you that missed it, here are some of the things that I touched on: Take a look at my slide deck. I talked about the RSS Platform and what it does to prevent feed servers from being melted by RSS traffic. I actually posted about this topic more in depth last week RSS Platform Download Engine, so I won t repeat it here. I also talked about the API and showed a demo of a sample application. The sample application takes the calendar data from individual Mix06 sessions and adds appointments into the user s Outlook calendar. The session s calendar data is available in the Mix06 Session RSS feed. Look for the msevents namespace. Each Mix06 attendee was able to create a personalized calendar with sessions of their interest. For example, take a look at mine. nbsp; Not only does the sample application import sessions as appointments into the Outlook calendar, but it also updates individual appointments if the corresponding sessions change. Imagine running this sample code each time the feed is updated, then the user s Outlook calendar will stay up to date when the user adds new sessions or when sessions change. In essence I demonstrated how a simple light weight one way sync of calendar information can be implemented on top of the RSS Platform. Following, Greg Reinacker Founder and CTO of NewsGator joined me on stage to show how we ve created an ecosystem around RSS to connect to websites, machines, devices, etc. He demoed the integration between the Windows RSS Platform and the NewsGator Online service. NewsGator wrote an application that keeps the Common Feed List in sync with the subscription list in NewsGator Online including the read unread state of individual items blog posts. Since NewsGator supports multiple clients and devices he showed how a user can read feeds over the course of a day on a PC using IE7 browser at an internet cafe using NewsGator Online Mac using NetNewsWire Windows Mobile Smartphone using a new NewsGator mobile client Greg and his team did a great job and it was a pleasure working with them leading up to the conference. nbsp; nbsp; nbsp; The overall point of my presentation was to show how publisher s can easily add RSS to their sites and take advantage of the support that IE7 and the Windows RSS Platform have to offer, as well as to show developers how easy it is to add RSS support to their applications. I encourage you, as I did the attendees to install IE7 Beta 2 Preview released on 3 20 , and investigate what IE7 and the Windows RSS Platform have to offer for publisher s and developers. Some useful links for publishers include the Publisher s Guide as well as additional information on the Simple List Extensions here and here. For developers, we have posted the overview of the platform, a description of different ways developers can integrate with the platform, and some sample code. I really enjoyed the opportunity to work with Greg and present to a great and engaging crowd. Walter vonKoch

IE7 Beta 2 is now available for general download! Read Dean s nbsp;post to the IE blog for more details, or skip to the download here. For people who have downloaded the previews of Beta 2, you ll find improved stability and a number of fixed issues in the RSS user experience and the RSS Platform. If you haven t looked at IE7 yet, this is the build to install. What to expectAs a recap of what you can expect in IE7, I ve put together a collection of links to previous posts we made about the RSS features of nbsp;IE and the Windows RSS Platform. nbsp; Introduction to the RSS user experience: Part 1: Overview Part 2: Discovery and Subscription Part 3: Reading and Managing feeds Part 4: Examples of SLE sorting and filtering nbsp; and list behavior. Additional information for publishers of RSS feeds can be found in the RSS team s Publisher s Guide work in progress . Windows RSS Platform: Part 1: Introduction to the Platform Part 2: Building on the RSS Platform Part 3: Feed API documentation nbsp; Part 4: Introduction to the download engine nbsp; Part 5: Sample code: RSS screensaver updated to work against the Beta 2 build! More information will be coming in the next few weeks. If you there is something you have a question about, let nbsp; us know in the comments or directly at teamrss microsoft.com. Feedback With this release, we ll be transitioning from the feedback wiki we used in the previous releases to the the IE feedback system that was announced last month. We ll be tracking all IE RSS issues through the IE feedback system, as well as using the system for the Windows RSS Platform. The best place to learn about this is from Al s post about feedback and support for the IE release. The really cool thing about this new system is that bugs filed go directly into our main bug tracking database, which is itself tied into our bug checkin system.When a fix to your bug is checked into the code, you ll know it immediately through the tracking system. Al s post has all the details you need. The feedback from the the wiki in the previous release has been really great and we re looking forward to more. On behalf of the entire team, I hope you check out Beta 2, try it with your favorite sites and feeds, and let us know what you think. Sean