Visual Studio .NET RSS Viewer with XSL

• Download source code - 5.5 Kb

Introduction

RSS feeds are more and more popular and as any site that respects itself, CodeProject also provides a nice RSS feed with information about the latest articles.

As Steven Hicks just noticed in the Lounge http://www.codeproject.com/lounge.asp#xx761109xx CodeProject RSS link is not so easy to notice. If you are a real CPA (CodeProjectAdict) you do want to see "What's new on CP" at any moment. And the best place to see it is of course in you VS.Net environment where you spend most of you time anyway. Plus that you don't have to open a new explorer window just to see if there is anything new on CP.

And if you could also see the latest news in the CodeProject style (colors, fonts) it would be even nicer.

XSL

Thus, to achive this goal I made a small XSL file to translate the RSS from CP to a nice formated HTML webpage that gets displayed inside VS.Net but a simple mouse click.

Macro

The macro is based 99% on the one provided by Davy Mitchell in his article Visual Studio .NET RSS Headline Viewer.

    Function GetHTML(ByVal strPage As String) As String

        If strPage.StartsWith("http://") Then
            Try
                Dim oReq As System.Net.HttpWebRequest
                Dim oResp As System.Net.HttpWebResponse
                oReq = System.Net.HttpWebRequest.Create(strPage)
                oResp = oReq.GetResponse
                Dim sr As New StreamReader(oResp.GetResponseStream)
                Return sr.ReadToEnd()
            Catch
                'Do something with your error        
            End Try
        Else    ' local file ?
            Dim sr As StreamReader = New StreamReader(strPage)
            Return sr.ReadToEnd()
        End If

    End Function


    Public Sub RefreshRSS()
        Try
            'DESCRIPTION: Grabs headlines and displays them as text.
            Dim RDFText As String
            Dim objTextDoc As TextDocument
            Dim objEP As EditPoint

            'Create a new text document.
            Call DTE.ItemOperations.NewFile("General\Text File")

            'Get a handle to the new document.
            objTextDoc = DTE.ActiveDocument.Object("TextDocument")
            objEP = objTextDoc.StartPoint.CreateEditPoint
            RDFText = GetHTML(http://www.codeproject.com/ & _ 
                  "webservices/articlerss.aspx?cat=3")

            objEP.Insert("<?xml-stylesheet type=""text/xsl"" " & _
                  "href=""change.xsl""?>" + vbCrLf)

            RDFText = RDFText.Replace("©", "(c)")

            objEP.Insert(RDFText)

            'Store
            ActiveDocument.Save("C:\\temp\\news.xml")
            ActiveDocument.Close()

            Dim ItemOp As ItemOperations
            ItemOp = DTE.ItemOperations
            ItemOp.Navigate("file://C:\temp\news.xml", _
                  vsNavigateOptions.vsNavigateOptionsDefault)

        Catch err As System.Exception
            MsgBox(err.ToString)
        End Try
    End Sub

Usage

• Unzip the files to a folder of your choice (C:\temp) for example.
• Drop this macro in your macro editor, assign the macro to a button and update the paths in the macro with the path where you unziped the files.
• Click the button :).