SSE Update and Tutorial

SSE Update

Id like to thank the community for providing valuable feedback on the SSE spec through the FEED-TECH mailing list.  Were learning a lot from you, and appreciate your questions, comments, suggestions.  Based on the feedback weve received and some discoveries weve made building sample code, weve released a revision of the SSE Specification (version 0.91). You can track the specific changes weve made to this revision of the spec in the change history, and well be archiving all previous versions of the spec, at least for duration of the review process.  Id like to highlight a few changes weve incorporated that are attributable to the community review process:

Thanks to:

• Charles Cook pointed out via the FEED-TECH mailing list that there are cases where independent replication of hierarchical items could result in cycles (in which two items each point to the other as a parent). To address that possibility, weve added a deterministic algorithm to break cycles.
• Yc J suggested that we add a spec version number to the format (to deal with future compatibility). Makes perfect sense, and weve added it in this rev.

Things Not Yet Addressed in this Version:

• Date Format: Were still contemplating how best to properly define the date format. As Danny Ayers, Sam Ruby, David Powell and others have pointed out, there are better date formats than RFC 822. For example, were trying to figure out how to support dc:date. (Though weve at least fixed the examples and have stated explicitly that valid dates are RFC 822 with 4-digit years [which is the format for RSS 2.0]).

Also, Id like to highlight some examples of SSE in the wild that have recently emerged.  Its great to see early adopters like Matt Terenzio take the initiative with projects like SkinnyFarm.  If you have used SSE in a project and would like to share your experience with the community, please let us know via the mailing list.

Tutorial and Samples

Weve received lots of requests both from the community and from within Microsoft- for samples, samples, samples of SSE code in action.  We heard you. Here is a tutorial outlining SSE 101 with accompanying samples.  The tutorial walks through a progression of modifications to SSE-enabled RSS feeds, highlighting both the XML feed content along with easy-to-read commented JavaScript code that you can run on your own feed to start kicking the tires.  Paresh Suthar, a member of our concept development team, deserves the credit for creating the sample; this is just the first in a series of samples and documentation we plan to provide to the community.

I encourage you to download the tutorial and provide feedback to the feed tech mailing list. If you havent already, please subscribe to the list by sending email to: listserv@discuss.microsoft.com with the message body subscribe feed-tech or use the web-based subscription form.

- Jack