Reading Syndication Feeds from within Silverlight 2 beta

I have been preparing for a TechPoint presentation on Silverlight with some nice graphics. I am trying to retrieve some data from an Rss feed and present in a Silverlight User Control.

So I started with the Silverlight Quickstart for Syndication

But I found that I was getting the HttpWebResponse returning "Not found"

From doing some reading I found that using a service has similar constraints/issues

After some guidance from Tim Heuer and Jose Fajardo on cross-domain calls I found that its not possible to directly access a feed unless a crossdomain.xml file is in existance on the target side.

Workarounds:

  1. Use a local service to retrieve the feed and give the service the crossdomain.xml file
  2. Use feedburner (which has a crossdomain.xml file) to surrogate the target feed

During this process I came across two good dev tools:

Web development helper (incidentally there is one similar built in ie8)

(screen shot below showing the HTTP trace highlighting 404 on target XML)

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and this site for recognizing your IP (useful for mobile device IP recogntion)