Over the last couple of days over half the blogs that I subscribe to have reposted the fact that IE7 has RTM’d. Of which probably the best blog to read is probably Sandi’s as she is definitely one of the leading authorities on things IE. Not being a big fan of reposting I thought that I would provide a different angle on the release of IE7. As most people will be aware of is that IE has RSS feed reading capabilities built in. A feature that some people won’t be aware of is that this uses the Common Feeds List which a number of Microsoft products going forward will be using. These products include Outlook 2007 and Windows Live Mail Desktop. The built in functionality is more than just a local store for RSS feeds, it also have built in scheduling to synchronise the feeds and the ability to track which feeds/items have been read. Although the interface in IE7 is very rudimentary the support through Outlook 2007 is very nice indeed.
Of course the next question is whether there is an API for accessing this feeds store. Well the great news is that Microsoft have come to the party with a quite extensive API, including documentation and a C# sample to get you started.