I recently decided to try again to use a news aggregator as part of my daily routine. News aggregators, for those who have been as ignorant of this topic as I have been, are programs designed to download feeds from various sites and display them in one, easy to get at, place. It's good for sites that post entries with news -- blogs, news sites, etc. All this is possible because of various XML standards for publishing news lists -- see here for a collection of RSS sites if you're interested.
I'd tried Headline Viewer, which is supposedly one of the more popular Windows aggregators. My experience with it wasn't so good, though. I didn't find it easy to use, and, worse, it wasn't compatible with RSS 2.0, which more and more news sites use. Not so useful.
I tried a couple of others, but, again, none really seemed to impress me.
Then I stumbled on a program written, of all things, as .NET sample code by a Microsoft engineer. Called RSS Bandit, it's actually become my favorite program. You can download an installer from the MSDN site that gives you not only the program, but also the C# source code.
The one thing that it didn't do is support blogs that are password-protected. It's not exactly typical to see something like that, but there is one blog that I read all the time that is (hi Ms. L!). Fortunately, adding support for this was easy -- in about 40 minutes, I had it working, despite never having worked with the .NET web access components before. The help system in Visual Studio .NET is really nice.
Now I have one program that I can go to to check on updates from the various blogs I read and some of the computer news sites. Nice...
Can you send me the piece of code you applied to Bandit to enable reading password-protected blogs? Would nicly integrate this feature into the next release of Bandit.
See also: http://www31.brinkster.com/rssbandit/