The search for a flexible ASP.NET rss library

Over the past couple months, I have been working on updating my Optic Rapture web site. I've mainly just been converting it from php to C#, and updating graphics. That part was pretty straightforward. For new content, I thought it would be nice to consume my Atalasoft blog, and this blog into one central location. .NET 2.0 didn't seem to make it all that easy to consume rss feeds, so I went out looking for some libraries that do.

The first one that I found was called Raccoom, and it consumed my Atalasoft rss feed just fine. When it came to adding the rss feed for this blog, however, it didn't have the ability to consume the description or summary because it wasn't actually called by that name. I think that since Blogger's feeds use Atom, and are converted from Atom by using a querystring, the summary tag was actually atom:summary instead of summary. Maybe I gave up too soon, but I decided to go looking for another library.

The second one that I found was RssToolkit on dmitryr's blog. This one allows a more generic access to the tags inside the rss feed. Tag can be accessed like this: myRssChannel.Items["atom:summary"]. With this library, I was able to consume both feeds as long as I knew what tags to look for.

If you are looking for an rss library that is both functional and flexible, I would highly recommend using RssToolkit.