Problems Reading RSS with C# and .net 3.5

Question

I have been attempting to write some routines to read RSS and ATOM feeds using the new routines available in System.ServiceModel.Syndication, but unfortunately the Rss20Feed

Answer 1

RSS 2.0 formatted syndication feeds utilize the RFC 822 date-time specification when serializing elements like pubDate and lastBuildDate. The RFC 822 date-time specification is unfortunately a very 'flexible' syntax for expressing the time-zone component of a DateTime.

Time zone may be indicated in several ways. "UT" is Universal Time (formerly called "Greenwich Mean Time"); "GMT" is permitted as a reference to Universal Time. The military standard uses a single character for each zone. "Z" is Universal Time. "A" indicates one hour earlier, and "M" indicates 12 hours earlier; "N" is one hour later, and "Y" is 12 hours later. The letter "J" is not used. The other remaining two forms are taken from ANSI standard X3.51-1975. One allows explicit indication of the amount of offset from UT; the other uses common 3-character strings for indicating time zones in North America.

I believe the issue involves how the zone component of the RFC 822 date-time value is being processed. The feed formatter appears to not be handling date-times that utilize a local differential to indicate the time zone.

As RFC 1123 extends the RFC 822 specification, you could try using the DateTimeFormatInfo.RFC1123Pattern ("r") to handle converting problamatic date-times, or write your own parsing code for RFC 822 formatted dates. Another option would be to use a third party framework instead of the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace classes.

It appears there are some known issues with date-time parsing and the Rss20FeedFormatter that are in the process of being addressed by Microsoft.