Posted on Wednesday, October 05, 2011 2:50 PM
The title of this post may generate a whole lot of questions. But that’s fine, I really don’t care. Some may think I have started some super secret project for the next propulsion system of space craft, but no, none of that is happening. It’s not hyper-ion, but just Hyperion, the name of one of the Greek mythology characters. But what has that got to do with me?
Well, I just started a little project of my own, which I decided to name Hyperion. The main objective of the program is to build a lean and mean RSS feed reader. I know, there are a million of those flying around over the Internet. But my goal is also to include many new features of the .NET 4.0 framework and have it as some sort of reference application. It’s build in C#, currently still at 3.0 version, using a WPF front-end. The application uses the M-V-VM pattern and makes use of asynchronous processing.
I also intend to include the Windows WPF Ribbon, but since the last available preview of that is not exactly what one would like and expect, that is currently on hold. Given the changes that will be made to the WPF Ribbon on the road to it’s V1 release, it would mean lot’s of double work if I were to go ahead with implementing the current version. Also, the changes that are in the pipeline will offer better support for M-V-VM, so I’ll just wait for V1 of the WPF Ribbon.
As the core feed engine, I’m using IE’s feed mechanism, so it also fully integrates with Internet Explorer, Live Mails and Outlooks capabilities of maintaining feeds. It’s just some other view on the same data, I guess. 
The idea is to have an initial three panel view as the default, showing a tree view of the subscribed feeds, a list view of the feed items for the selected feed and a reading pane for the content of the selected feed item. It should look like the one in the picture. For the reading pane, a FlowDocument is created and provided to the panel which contains a FlowDocumentReader control.
In order to get the content of the item displayed in a well-formed manner, the HTML content is converted to XAML content of type FlowDocument. The conversion is made with the help of the HTMLToXAML conversion project floating on the web somewhere at windowsclient.com. It spells out in the readme that it is not a fully functional converter, since some tags are not supported, while others have a minimum implementation. So that’s something to work on as well. I hope I will get to that myself and at the moment consider building it using F#.
Seems like I have enough to do. So lets get working on it. Oh, BTW, one may be wondering what happened to my other over-ambitious project. The one where I was to build a Reflector like tool with support for many diagrams etc. all based on the compiled assembly code. Well, that one is still lurking somewhere, but has less priority at the moment. Besides that, it seems that integration of many features I had in mind into Visual Studio 2010 is making it more difficult for me to built something that makes VS2010 look silly. And that’s a task I’m not up to yet.
NOTE: this is a repost, I had to remove it and create it again to remove some stupid feedback item.
Meile