Imperative RSS and .NET!

I’m building the next release of Dev’garten and I want to include a section on the upcoming lunch-time events being run at the CITC, and I’m going to make sure it’s RSS enabled.

But I’m also using LINQ, so my app arch is pretty much data being served to my app tier through DLINQ and then simple UI mapping between the object to be rendered and the ASP.NET component, but it occurred to me, there needs to be a RSS framework where I can create mappings between data objects and RSS objects. Nothing fancy, but needs to be completely imperative, cos’ I don’t want to write class code to do the work.

My minds eye says the process should go:

1. Add reference to Rss namespace
2. Decorate objects with Rss attributes (so class will be channel, collections could be items, properties could be item elements)

So I then drop a UI component on a ASP.NET page, and as soon as I bind it to my object that is decorated with Rss attributes, the UI component automagically adds a little RSS icon to the UI element and generates an Rss Feed Guid and registers it with the Rss Frameworks providers. 

Now the feed is primed, the next step is to compose it. I reckon a web service, HttpHandler or even a web handler (ashx) would do the trick, just pass it the Rss Feed Guid, it loads the objects, composes the Rss Feed output, and tada, neato.

Anyone seen anything like this, please let me know, otherwise, I dare say it will be my next code crunk ;) 

Update: It was late, and my feet hurt, but I meant declarative not imperative…L!