Windows Azure Feed Reader

My Honours year project at university was to build something – anything- on a cloud computing service. The emergence of Windows Azure as a credible force in cloud computing and the big push by Dave Winer for his CloudRSS protocol converged to give me the idea to build a real-time RSS reader using the Windows Azure cloud computing environment and the CloudRSS protocol.

Now that the academic year is over, there is this wonderful project just gathering dust on my hard drive. Its a nice introduction to MVC, Windows Azure, Windows Azure Storage and Windows Live ID.

Rather than to simply open source the code, I thought I’d re-write it. This time, I’d integrate a lot of ideas and changes not possible before. I’d also move the focus of the project away from Realtime RSS and to a feed reader. Hence rather than write a CloudRSS implementation first and feed reader second, I’d write a feed reader first and a realtime RSS system second.

Along the way I thought I’d do a series of screencasts, a kind of making of. I feel the need to paraphrase Bismarcks’ observation that one should not see laws, sausages and my Feedreader being made – its never pretty (joke).

You can read some more background information here, here and here.

So here are the Posts:

• Part 1 – Covers the groundwork, implements basic RSS retrieval capability.
• Part 2 – Begins working with our worker role, and Windows Azure Storage.
• Part 3 – We get or code to download, parse and display a feed on the web front end.
• Part 4: the OPML Edition – We test and integrate the OPML code written in part 3.
• Part 5: User Authentication – We implement both Google Federated Login and the Windows Live Web Authentication SDK
• Part 6: Eat Your Vegetables – We fix bugs for most of the episode. Tedious. feel free to skip to episode 7
• Part 7: User Subscriptions – We clean up our HTML views (somewhat). We also get around to (mostly) implementing user subscriptions
• Part 8 – We finished implementing code to take account of User Subscriptions when adding RSS Feeds. We make a start on our update code.

Some extras:

• Windows Azure Feedreader: Choosing a Login System – Which would you choose?
• Note to Self – Use OutputCache in MVC 3