Since XML is one of the core languages for Microsoft applications, I am not surprise Microsoft announced that Longhorn will incorporate RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as a core technology. This news has been confirmed during the Gnomedex conference in Seattle last Friday, June 24, 2005.

Quoted:
Gary Schare, director of strategic product management in the Windows division of Microsoft, says that while RSS is a reliable standard for updating information in message form, it currently has no logical way to organize that information in a way that could help subscribers keep track of what is being fed to them.

“RSS is good for delivering what’s new, but not so good for things that are getting sorted or reordered,” Schare says.

RSS capability will be built into the OS, for example, you can have one set of newsfeed subscriptions show up in any Longhorn-compatibled newsreader or other application. Microsoft also says that Longhorn’s RSS will make it easier for software developers to incorporate RSS-enabled features into their programs without having to build the functionality from scratch.

Quoted:
RSS is primarily used by Web loggers and Web-based news publishers to keep subscribers informed when new Web log entries or news articles have been posted to Web sites. These updates are commonly known as “RSS feeds” and are chosen by Web users according to their interests in particular information published on various sites.

This news indirectly confirmed another good news: Future versions of IE (Internet Explorer) under Windows XP will also get at least some RSS functionality. Microsoft isn’t talking about what it might do with RSS in other applications, but you can certainly imagine all kinds of uses for RSS feeds, ranging from calendar synching in Outlook, to image libraries in Word or PowerPoint, to help systems that auto-update themselves.

Quoted:
Today, RSS is still mostly an extremely handy way to get blogs, news items, Podcasts, and other chunks of information delivered to you. But the technology has the potential to be a powerful, universal means of automated communication between applications (both Web- and desktop-based) of all sorts. This news from Microsoft could help make that happen.

HmMm… It’s time to pick up some XML programming then.