Crazy Feed

MSDN subscribers have two choices when it comes to getting new software. Either you will visit MSDN site every few days to see what is new or you will subscribe to their feed. Logic would dictate that MSDN feed should be preferred way of doing this - every time something new arrives you get notification in your RSS reader.

Because of some idiotic programming MSDN feed is worse than useless. For example today I had total of 370 of new items in my feed. Those are probably quite a same items that were available yesterday when I had around 200 items. Or day before that when another 200 ended up in my reader. Who knows, maybe there was some new software inside. I haven’t got a clue since I was too lazy to read everything.

I am not sure why this happens - I am too lazy to investigate thoroughly. And no, it is not a RSS reader’s fault since no other feed exhibits such behavior. My guess would be that missing GUID and pubDate that keeps on changing are one to blame. Without unique GUID for each item it is very difficult for any program to say what remains same and what is really different.

It would be easy for Microsoft to fix RSS feed but they haven’t in last three years so I am not holding my breath. After all, they never said that developer’s satisfaction is their priority.

P.S. As I wrote this, I noticed another 300+ waiting…