Windows and RSS: beyond blogging

RSS (and related technologies like Atom) are gaining significant traction as a means for allowing users to "subscribe" to content on the web and get notified when new content is available. More recently, "podcasting" -- a simple extension to RSS to enable references to audio files -- has taken off as a means to subscribe to episodal audio content. More generally, RSS feeds are being used in many arenas to communicate all sorts of different types of content, either using extensions to the RSS format, or simply by transmitting binary files.At its heart, RSS is a very simple XML-based format with very simple semantics, but the potential uses appear endless. This talk will examine many of the uses of RSS, and discuss why this simple format has become so important that Microsoft is building native support for RSS into its next generation operating system and browser platforms.It will also cover many of the technical challenges inherent in building scalable support for RSS into a client operating system.