Needles And Haystacks

Sometimes, programming is a matter of finding out the right sample or note that explains what you need to do in the right way or even just out right gives you the code you need. Having google at the tip of my fingers has given me quite the reputation of figuring out things quickly. (Of course, google isn't the only search engine out there, but I really like it)

So what I would like to do is to periodically put in what I did, how I did it, and sometimes where I figured things out. Of course, giving credit is hard sometimes, since the last thing on a body's mind is authorship when it comes to deadlines.

One example of which was the whole concept of RSS Feeds. It turns out that RSS feeds are simply XML documents sitting out there on web servers, being either recreated manually, or by services, or being generated on the fly by dynamic web pages.

So how do you get an RSS feed? Well, in ActionScript, you setup an HTTP Service. Here is how you setup a connection to the yahoo weather RSS service.

    <mx:HTTPService
        id="weatherService"
        url="http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss"
        resultFormat="e4x"
        result="resultHandler(event);"/>

Basically, the service goes out and reads that URL and returns the XML data. Once the result returns, we can parse the data out as we need to.

In C#, it is a very quick matter of using an XmlTextReader and an XmlDocument. You create the XmlTextReader by passing in the URL of the XML document. Then load the XML document itself by using the XmlDocument's "Load" method.

So... we'll see what I come accross next and I'll post what I find.