Microsoft Download Center RSS Feed with Enclosures

Got enclosures?

Many moons ago, Richard Birkby and I wrote a primitive but useable RSS feed that listed the ten (10) latest downloads posted to the Microsoft Download Center. The RSS feed was generated & cached every thirty (30) minutes and worked well for a long time.

Fast-forward to October, 2004. Since RSS enclosures (AKA, podcasting) are da bomb this week in the blogsphere, I decided to update the feed to include enclosures. It can be found here.

Why should you care about RSS enclosures? Because they provide a mechanism of content delivery. For example, if you use God’s RSS aggregator, NewsGator, then you can configure a feed to automatically download any attachments/enclosures that are persisted in the feed:

When new items are posted to the feed, RSS readers can now grab these enclosures in the background. Individuals like Carl Franklin (co-host of .NET Rocks! and fellow RD) are jumping onboard to see how they can exploit this technology for other means.

Enjoy.