My.Blogs

My.Blogs
Extending My to Bring New Power to Visual Basic
Weblogs and weblog feeds (XML representations of blogs entries) have changed the way we share information. Whether you're looking for information about Microsoft Visual Basic, software development in general, or even your favorite hobby, chances are there are a number of blogs covering the subject if you're not already blogging it yourself.
My.Blogs is a collection of sample code that will show you how you can easily provide programmatic access to weblogs in the applications you build. The My.Blogs sample code allows you to:
Read weblog entries using straightforward syntax from RSS 2.0, ATOM 1.0, and RDF 1.0 feeds (along with any comments posted).
Post to weblogs using the MetaWebLog API for Community Server from Telligent Systems and other servers that support the MetaWeblog API.
Extend My.Blogs to include more feed formats and more posting APIs without changing how My.Blogs works in code.
My.Blogs makes writing weblog centric code incredibly straightforward, even if you’re not familiar with the underlying standards to make weblogs work. For example, you can use My.Blogs to read from a blog and populate a DataGridView with blog entries in just a few lines of code:
Dim MyFeed As MyBlogs.Feed MyFeed = My.Blogs.Read("http://blogs.msdn.com/vbteam/Rss.aspx") Me.BlogEntries.DataSource = MyFeed.Entries
By using My.Blogs, you can add weblog reading and posting to any number of applications. The sample code provides great starter applications that include a Windows Forms, a ASP.NET 2.0 web application and a Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office Outlook Add-In. Build off of these applications or create your own to get started creating weblog centric applications.
To get started check out the overview article of My.Blogs or you can learn more about Creating an Outlook My.Blogs Managed Code Add-in.