Providing access to the Common Feed List

The Microsoft Windows RSS Platform is an application programming interface (API) that enables applications to access and manipulate the Common Feed List, a collection of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to which the user has subscribed.

Use the Windows RSS Platform in your applications to:

Subscribe to new feeds, and enumerate existing subscriptions.
Easily access properties of feeds (channels), feed items, and enclosures.
Manage and organize feeds into folders.
Listen for and respond to feed and feed folder events.
Check the status of the background Feed Download Engine, or modify settings.
Normalize the Extensible Markup Language (XML) source of a feed.

The Windows RSS Platform is available with Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista.

...As part of the RSS support in Internet Explorer 7, users can discover and subscribe to RSS feeds within the browser. When the user subscribes to a feed, it is added to the Common Feed List, which is available for clients to use in addition to or instead of their own list. For example, in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, the user's subscription list can import feeds from the Common Feed List. This enables the discovery of feeds within Internet Explorer and then for those discovered feeds to appear in other applications.
The Feed Download Engine downloads feeds and merges the new items with the existing data in the feed store. Using the Windows RSS Platform, applications can then expose the feed data to the user. The RSS Explorer of Windows Vista, for example, provides an excellent text reading experience for news and blog feeds, whereas Microsoft Windows Media Player enables users to listen to audio feeds. The consumption of feed data varies by application; the Windows RSS Platform makes a variety of scenarios possible by providing easy access to the feed data.
The top-level object in the Windows RSS Platform is the FeedsManager object. To create the object for scripting, use the programmatic identifier (PROGID)Microsoft.FeedsManager. To create the object for use with C/C++, call CoCreateInstance with CLSID_FeedsManager (defined in the msfeeds.h header file).

Exposes methods that provide access to the Common Feed List, which is a hierarchy of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to which the user is subscribed.