Integrating ASP.NET MVC into an existing ASP.NET Webforms application

If, like me you’re not always blessed with the opportunity to build every application from scratch, you may find yourself wanting to introduce the wholesome goodness of ASP.NET MVC into an existing ‘classic’ ASP.NET Webforms application. Most tutorials out there concentrate on nice green field development.

What follows is largely a reference for me to remember how to do this.  It’s basically a matter of manually injecting what the project templates do for a new application.  I’m also not professing to have come up with all of these steps – I’m just bringing them together.

I’ll assume you’ve got all the necessary prerequisites (MVC 4.0) installed already, and if you have a web ‘site’ project, then I’d suggest you update it to a web application before doing all of this.

Getting the structure and configuration to look like MVC

There’s a number of standard folders, and bits of code you’ll find dotted around MVC applications – Models/Views/Controller for instance 🙂

The following article goes through the first steps of getting those folders into your project (assuming you don’t have a naming conflict).

Mixing ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC

Updating to MVC4

This is all good, but that article’s a bit old, and you’ll find the next one brings you (mostly) up to date with MVC 4.0

Adding MVC 4.0 to WebForms Project

If you want to use any of the newer features such as bundling, or if you’ve copied some views from an MVC4 project into your new MVC project, you’ll need the ASP.NET Web Optimization Framework (get it from NuGet).

You may also want to take an MVC4 project and convert the global.asax code to call off to the classes in the App_Start folder…

    public class MvcApplication : System.Web.HttpApplication
    {
        protected void Application_Start()
        {
            AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();

            WebApiConfig.Register(GlobalConfiguration.Configuration);
            FilterConfig.RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilters.Filters);
            RouteConfig.RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
            BundleConfig.RegisterBundles(BundleTable.Bundles);
            AuthConfig.RegisterAuth();
        }
    }

Getting the Visual Studio MVC Template Goodness

This is great, but the icing on the cake is to make Visual Studio think this is an MVC project, so you get the nice right-click options, like add–>Controller if you’re in the controllers folder.  It turns out you just need to fool Visual Studio by adding a project type guid in your web projects csproj file…

With Visual Studio I just did a quick diff between a new MVC 4 project’s project file, and my ‘hybrid’ project’s file.

The following is what you’re looking for…


<SchemaVersion>2.0</SchemaVersion>
<ProjectGuid>{18BBC72C-702B-40CD-B347-D7FC66D276FA}</ProjectGuid>
<ProjectTypeGuids>{E3E379DF-F4C6-4180-9B81-6769533ABE47};{349c5851-65df-11da-9384-00065b846f21};{fae04ec0-301f-11d3-bf4b-00c04f79efbc}</ProjectTypeGuids>

If you just add the first ‘ProjectTypeGuids’ guid to the corresponding place in your project file, and reload, the magic happens, and Visual Studio thinks it’s now an MVC project.  You’ll probably find you already had the other 2 guids.

Deploying the minimum Oracle Instant Client files with ODP.NET

If you’re looking for the smallest and least hassle deployment of Oracle client files with a .NET application, then forget about everything else you’ve been told – the following did the trick for me, and involves just 5 Oracle dll’s.

Deploying ODP.NET with Oracle Instant client

One thing I found with this was that on my dev machine I already have (more than) one ‘standard’ Oracle installation and all the network config from that was really getting in the way meaning I couldn’t connect for one reason or another – OR I was connecting, but not using the correct client, meaning deployed files wouldn’t work on a ‘virgin’ machine.  All of this rather depends on how your company deploys Oracle server and clients I guess.

Rather than muck about with setting environment variables (that’s so 80’s) if you use a full connection string syntax as follows you can use your hostname and SID rather than try and fathom out service names. 

In your web.config

  <add name=”MyDB” connectionString=”Data Source=(DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST =(ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = machinename)(PORT = 1521)))(CONNECT_DATA =(SID = mysid)));User Id=username;Password=password;” providerName=”” />

Any other variation of the (mucho confusing) Oracle connection syntax just didn’t work for me.

As an aside – I also kept getting System.OutOfMemoryException when building a web site project in Visual Studio 2008 when I was using the Oracle Basic client dll’s (110mb +).  I switched to the smaller Basic ‘Lite’ versions and it was happy again.  I guess a single file of over 100mb blows the lid off the IDE.

CommaDelimitedStringCollection – for when you want to write a comma delimited string from a collection !

Amazing that I still find BCL classes every day in .NET to do simple tasks.  I had a feeling that something may exist but didn’t expect to find it in the System.Configuration namespace.

using System.Configuration;

CommaDelimitedStringCollection strings = new CommaDelimitedStringCollection();

foreach(string item in myOtherCollection)
{
    strings.Add(item);
}

//Spit out your comma separated string
string output = strings.ToString();

Simple!

Using local SQL 2005 Express databases, |DataDirectory| setting and SQLBulkCopy with SemiColon delimited text files


Had some fun with this today as I was utterly confused why I wasn’t able to save data to my SQL2005 express DB (linked within a Windows Forms VS 2005 project), even though I wasn’t getting any errors from a SQLBulkCopy operation.  The connection string was set (from the wizard) to use ‘|DataDirectory|\dbname.mdf.

It turned out of course that the reason there wasn’t an error was because the data was being written fine, but just not to the database I was looking at.  By default any database linked in your project file will be copied to the output folder (bin\debug) when you build.  It does this ‘every time‘.  I thought I was going mad as I wasn’t getting primary key violations trying to insert the same data over and over again!

The useful info is in this MSDN blog entry.  It talks about different options for working around the local databases, but I plumped for a subfolder (called data) in my project, then setting ‘Copy if newer’ on the MDF file rather than ‘do not copy’.  This just means that if you make a schema change then it will blow everything away (probably what I normally want in debug-land).

The reason I was using the SQLBulkCopy class was so I could take in a dataset picked from a semicolon-delimited text file. 
The first thing to do was read the text file into a dataset – and after some mucking about with the Jet OleDb provider and avoiding changing registry entries (to get it to recognise ‘;’ as the delimiter) I found that a schema.ini file is what’s required.

Here’s some quick code I then used to get a DataSet from a semicolon-delimited Text File:

       

       /// <summary>
        /// Import from a given file to database
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name=”fileName”>File to import from (CSV)</param>
        
public void Import(string fileName)
        {
            
if (File.Exists(fileName))
            {
                SqlConnection connection 
= new SqlConnection(Properties.Settings.Default.RBStatsConnectionString);
                
//Get Dataset from file
                
DataSet importData GetDataSetFromFile(fileName);

                //Import using SQLBulkCopy
                
SqlBulkCopy copyManager = new SqlBulkCopy(connection.ConnectionString, SqlBulkCopyOptions.UseInternalTransaction);
                
copyManager.DestinationTableName “TShirtStatistic”;
                
copyManager.BatchSize importData.Tables[0].Rows.Count;
                try
                
{
                    copyManager.WriteToServer(importData.Tables[
0]);
                
}
                
catch (Exception exception)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine(exception)
;
                
}
                copyManager.Close()
;
                
connection.Close();
            
}

        }

        public DataSet GetDataSetFromFile(string fileName)
        {
            
//Ensure we’ve got a schema file to fudge the semicolon delimited text
            
string schemaFile Path.Combine(Path.GetDirectoryName(fileName), “schema.ini”);
            
File.Delete(schemaFile);
            string 
schemaContents “[” + Path.GetFileName(fileName) + “]\nColNameHeader=True\nCharacterSet=ANSI\nFormat=Delimited(;)”;
            
StreamWriter writer File.CreateText(schemaFile);
            
writer.Write(schemaContents);
            
writer.Close();

            string connectionString “Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=” + Path.GetDirectoryName(fileName) + “\\;Extended Properties=’text;HDR=Yes;FMT=Delimited'”;
            string 
query “SELECT * FROM ” + Path.GetFileName(fileName);
            
OleDbConnection connection = new OleDbConnection(connectionString);
            
OleDbCommand command = new OleDbCommand(query, connection);

            connection.Open();

            OleDbDataAdapter adapter = new OleDbDataAdapter(query, connection);
            
DataSet ds = new DataSet();
            
adapter.Fill(ds);

            return ds;

        }

Issues with data binding, Typed Datasets, DataRows and Null Values

Had some fun this morning as we’re trying to get a simple framework set up for a web app, that others can understand, using out-of-the-box functionality if possible.  I tried to avoid the normal tendency to put the ‘architecture hat‘ on and overcook it.  If you can’t be bothered to read all of this then just scroll to the bottom for the ‘take home’ on binding against typed datasets with null values.


We started off the prototype with a typed Dataset (including a couple of DB tables, and key relationships between each), a table adapter for each table, and a DetailsView at the front end, bound to an objectdatasource, which in turn talks to a business object that calls the TableAdapter.  That’s a lot for one sentence so from top to bottom…


DetailsView –> ObjectDataSource –> BusinessService –> TableAdapter –> Database


This all sounds pretty straightforward, and it is – unless (as in this case) you decide to have your business object pass back a single (strongly typed) DataRow for your front end to bind against.  This seemed reasonable at the time because I only ever want to show one row here.


You’ll basically get a StrongTypingException for every null field you try and bind, because by default a null field value will raise an exception when accessed through its generated property. 


We got distracted for a while exploring this as the natural tendency is to think ‘ah – I’ll make sure it doesn’t raise the exception’ – treating the symptom rather than the cause.


It turns out that any non-string field in a typed dataset table can’t have a default of null (or anything other than ‘raise exception’).  If you stuff in a _null value directly in the XSD your fields will disappear from the public properties (rather curiously) when you compile – so that’s not an ‘enterprise’ option.


I tried changing the return type in my business method to a generic DataRow to try and force the data binding to NOT use the strongly typed properties (getting warmer but still no dice.  I knew I was missing something really simple…


I then stumbled across a post (bottom of the page) that illustrated databinding will use different methods to bind based on what interfaces it finds.  The binding mechanism basically has no choice but to use the strongly typed public properties on a strongly typed or generic DataRow, as there’s no way for it to successfully enumerate the values.  If you bind against almost anything else you’ll most likely have no issues (it appears the databinding doesn’t rely solely on ITypedList).  We’re now binding against a typed DataTable (rather than generic DataView) and all’s fine.  If you want (rather) more info on ITypedList then look here.


So…


Don’t databind against a typed (or untyped) DataRow!

Refactoring the inefficient data loop

OK. Last one for today.  I’m not going to go into too much detail except to say that the offending piece of code loads all items in a ‘matrix’ database table and builds a business object collection hierarchy.  This table has 4 fields, one or more of which may be NULL – for different meanings.  I really don’t particularly like this type of approach but changing it right now would involve quite a bit of work.


The table looks something like


Level1ID
Level2aID
Level2bID
Level2cID


This ultimately translates to a business object hierarchy of:


 



  • Rows with Level1ID (only) – all other fields null – are Level1 objects
  • Rows with Level1ID and Level2a ID (only) are Level2a objects

etc…


 


The matrix table just contains the primary keys for each object so the code loads each one in the style below…


 


Load matrix
for each row in matrix
{
 if row type == Level1
     Add to Level1Collection
 else if row type == Level2a
 {
  Load Level2a object
  Add Level2a object to Level1[Level1ID].Level2aCollection
 }
 else if row type == Level2b
 {
  Load Level2b object
  Add Level2b object to Level1[Level1ID].Level2bCollection
 }
 else if row type == Level2c
 {
  Load Level2c object
  Add Level2c object to Level1[Level1ID].Level2cCollection
 }
}


 


This seems reasonable enough (logical anyway) given the way the data’s being retrieved.


This does however load another several hundred rows from more stored proc calls that load each new object into the child collections.  This whole thing consistently takes around 8 seconds.


 


The Refactoring


 


A wise man once told me that if you can be sure the bulk of your operation is data access then lump it all together if you can, and do the loop or other grunt processing on the client. 



  1. I created a new Stored Procedure to return 4 result sets.  These come back as 4 tables in the target DataSet.  Each resultset is qualified by the same master criteria, and just uses joins to get a set of data that can be loaded directly into the collections.  The original stored proc is no longer required and this is now the only data access call.
  2. I changed my collection classes slightly to allow a LoadData method which takes in a dataset, a tablename and a parent key.  This means I can add Level2a objects to the appropriate Level1 collection.  The pseudo code now looks like…

Load multiple results
for each row in matrix
{
 if Level1 Results present 
   LoadData on Level1Collection
    
 if Level2a Results present
  for each Level1 row
   LoadData on Level1[Level1ID].Level2aCollection
   
 if Level2b Results present
  for each Level1 row
   LoadData on Level1[Level1ID].Level2bCollection


 if Level2c Results present
  for each Level1 row
   LoadData on Level1[Level1ID].LevelcbCollection
 
}


As I said at the beginning, there are some definite improvements to be made from changing the data structure, and a lot of this code could look a lot nicer by using Typed Datasets with relationships defined.


 


The new approach actually completes in less than 100ms.  I couldn’t actually believe it myself, and made sure I killed connections, cache etc to make sure the database was coming in cold.  Still the same.


 


This basically proves that for data-heavy operations, things really start to hurt when you’re making repeated client round-trips, however small the call.  This is basically a 99% saving in load time for this business object. 


 


The resulting page is also really snappy now and I’m sure the customer won’t even notice 🙂


 


Feelgood Friday – Refactoring with .NET Generics


As it’s Friday I thought – let’s do some cleaning up.  The following exercise is refactoring a class from an app I’m maintaining at the moment.  The app’s fine (functional etc), and was originally a .NET 1.1 build.  A combination of this, a previous, straight conversion to .NET 2.0 (with the minimum of mods) and a variety of historical developers (mostly junior) means that the code has a certain amount of ‘odour’ in numerous places. 


Lack of consistency isn’t the main problem, it’s more about doing things smartly rather than taking the path of least resistance with your current knowledge.  The latter generally means you don’t learn much, get much satisfaction or pride in your work, and you may end up a tad confused as to why you always end up with the ‘less glamourous’ projects.


Here’s the original code.  A simple collection class containing custom MenuItem objects. 


    /// <summary>
    /// Represents a collection of MenuItems.
    /// </summary>
    
public class MenuItems
    {
        
private readonly ArrayList palMenuItems = new ArrayList();


        
// Add a MenuItem to the Collection
        
public void Add(MenuItem objMenuItem)
        {
            palMenuItems.Add(objMenuItem)
;
        
}

        
// Retrieve a MenuItem from the Collection
        
public MenuItem Item(string strTitle)
        {
            
if (palMenuItems.Count > 0)
            {
                
foreach (MenuItem objMenuItem in palMenuItems)
                {
                    
if (objMenuItem.Title.ToLower() == strTitle.ToLower())
                    {
                        
return objMenuItem;
                    
}
                }
            }
            
return new MenuItem();
        
}

        
// Returns True if the specified Key exists in the collection
        
public bool Exists(string strTitle)
        {
            
if (palMenuItems.Count > 0)
            {
                
foreach (MenuItem objMenuItem in palMenuItems)
                {
                    
if (objMenuItem.Title.ToLower() == strTitle.ToLower())
                    {
                        
return true;
                    
}
                }
            }
            
return false;
        
}

        
// Remove a MenuItem from the Collection
        
public void Remove(string strTitle)
        {
            
if (palMenuItems.Count > 0)
            {
                
foreach (MenuItem objMenuItem in palMenuItems)
                {
                    
if (objMenuItem.Title.ToLower() == strTitle.ToLower())
                    {
                        palMenuItems.Remove(objMenuItem)
;
                        break;
                    
}
                }
            }
        }

        
// Clear the collections contents
        
public void Clear()
        {
            palMenuItems.Clear()
;
        
}

        
// Return the Number of MenuItems in the Collection
        
public int Count()
        {
            
return palMenuItems.Count;
        
}

        
// Access to the enumerator
        
public MenuItemEnumerator GetEnumerator()
        {
            
return new MenuItemEnumerator(this);
        
}

        
#region MenuItem Enumaration Class

        
//=================================================================================================
        // Inner Enumeration Class:
        //=================================================================================================
        
public class MenuItemEnumerator
        {
            
private readonly MenuItems pMenuItems;
            private int 
position 1;

            public 
MenuItemEnumerator(MenuItems objMenuItems)
            {
                pMenuItems 
objMenuItems;
            
}

            
public MenuItem Current
            {
                
get return (MenuItem) pMenuItems.palMenuItems[position]}
            }

            
// Declare the MoveNext method required by IEnumerator:
            
public bool MoveNext()
            {
                
if (position < pMenuItems.palMenuItems.Count – 1)
                {
                    position++
;
                    return true;
                
}
                
else
                
{
                    
return false;
                
}
            }

            
// Declare the Reset method required by IEnumerator:
            
public void Reset()
            {
                position 
1;
            
}

            
// Declare the Current property required by IEnumerator:
        
}

        
#endregion
    
}




Colorized by: CarlosAg.CodeColorizer


OK – Here’s the issues I see with the code.



  1. You can spot some room for improvement immediately with variable naming (a weird variation of hungarian notation) – palMenuItems, objMenuItems etc.
  2. This is a simple wrapper implementation.  In conjunction with the naming you may conclude this is an ex-VB programmer who hasn’t quite grasped object-oriented concepts yet (an observation – not a criticism).  If the developer knew about inheritance then they would have hopefully just inherited from one of the many applicable classes in System.Collections.  This would have also removed the need for implementing a custom Enumerator class.  Note that neither class actually inherits from any useful base class.  This is copy/paste pseudo-inheritance, and is rarely a wise idea.
  3. The Exists and Item methods use a simple loop mechanism to find the item they’re looking for.  This is potentially wasteful with many items, and goes back to the ‘path of least resistance’ thought.  It’s also using the inefficient ‘ToLower’ implementation to do comparison of what should be a key.  In practice the match doesn’t need to be case-insensitive, and if it did then a String.Compare should be used with the appropriate ‘ignorecase’ argument).  The developer clearly isn’t familiar (or maybe just not comfortable) with dictionaries or hashtables where access to items via a key is supported and far more efficient.
  4. The Count implementation is a method rather than a property (aargh!)
  5. It could be argued that the menuitem class itself (not shown here) is redundant as the ASP.NET framework does define a similar MenuItem class.  In reality the whole implementation could be replaced with a sitemap, a menu control, and some custom code, but I’ll leave that out of scope for now.
That gives some pointers as to what ‘could’ have been done in .NET 1.1.  .NET 2.0 of course introduced generics and so let’s follow that path.

The MenuItems class is used in a few places:



  • A menu control (that renders menu items)
  • Many pages that load items into the control (I already refactored some of this into inherited menu controls, where all pages shared the same ‘dynamic’ menu), but there’s plenty more improvements to be made.

The first thing is to say…


I don’t need a collections class…


The following is now in the Menu Control:


        //private MenuItems menuItems = new MenuItems(); – Out with the Old
        
private Dictionary<string, MenuItem> menuItems = new Dictionary<string, MenuItem>()//In with the new

        
public Dictionary<string, MenuItem> MenuItems
        {
            
get return menuItems}
            
set { menuItems = value; }
        }




Colorized by: CarlosAg.CodeColorizer

This simply uses a generic Dictionary object with a string key (as we find items by title).  Anywhere that references this dictionary will now need to add a ‘key’ in certain places (e.g. Add method), and the Item method will no longer work as that’s gone.  That needs to change to a class indexer.


Fortunately Visual Studio’s find and replace can cope with all of this as the code is largely consistent…



A quick compile should show all the patterns (from the errors) if there’s any inconsistencies.  There were probably about 200 references to patch here with about 4 different variations of naming and scope – but it took about 5 minutes to patch (including writing this text :-))


We then have to patch all the ‘Item’ references.  These are almost always setting a ‘selected’ property (Stopwatch on…)


As there’s only a few references here (about 20), I could patch them manually, but this could be done entirely by using regular expressions to do the find and replace.  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/2k3te2cs.aspx shows all the options available.  I tend to only use regexp for large volume stuff where I get a return on my time investment to work out the expression! 


I’m just doing it in two steps without regexp as follows:



The code


            Menu1.MenuItems.Item(UserMenu.MyCommunicationItems).Selected = true;

becomes


            Menu1.MenuItems[UserMenu.MyCommunicationItems].Selected = true;


For extra points you then use Resharper to rename all of the obj and pal references to something reasonable, e,g, objMenuItem becomes menuItem.


Oh – and use Resharper’s ‘Find Usages’ on the MenuItems class to confirm it can be deleted.


And relax…..



In hindsight I would have used Resharper to ‘change signature’ on the methods in MenuItems (to patch all the references first), then converted to the generic Dictionary.  Could have been a bit quicker.


Hope this gives someone some courage to get in there and improve their code.  I firmly believe you’ve just got to ‘want’ to do it and then you’re biggest problem will be stopping yourself!



Developer Highway Code – Building secure software with .NET

Had some security training yesterday (don’t normally get training as a contractor so I was very happy to go along). 


The trainer mentioned the Developer Highway Code from Microsoft (seemingly originating from the UK based on the style of the publication).  Not only does it look cool, and have some rather amusing geek stuff (just see the ‘Reduce Coffee Now’ sign on the cover), it also has some really practical advice for people wanting to build secure applications.


Download it from Microsoft

If, For, Switch, but…

I love that Scott Hanselman challenges his own as well as others’ thoughts on how to solve technical problems.


I’m not making any judgements about junior devs vs. senior devs. I’m talking about idioms and “vocab.” I think that using only if, for and switch is the Computer Programmer equivalent of using “like” in every sentence. Like, you know, like, he was all, like, whatever, and I was like, dude, and he was, like, ewh, and I was like meh, you know?


There’s some good examples on forcing yourself to learn new objects, features and constructs through refactoring.  If you don’t refactor then you’ll never know…

Using RSS.NET to re-write an existing feed XML file

Don’t know what happened to RSS.NET.  Looks like it’s trying to go commercial, but still very quiet.  Code examples are few and far between (with some simple ones on the site).  Also on InformIT.


I’m writing a quick RSS console app (as I lost the last one I wrote!) that I can use to write an RSS feed from a SubVersion hook.  Most people use a pre-existing tool for Python (can’t remember the name), but I thought I’d give RSS.NET another go just for kicks.


The example above works fine assuming you’re maintaining state somewhere other than the feed xml file itself.  The example also assumes you’re serving this up to the web.  You can override the RssFeed.Write() method to take a filename.


If run the same code again (assuming you’ve written to a file) it will simply overwrite it with one item (not add to it).  This isn’t what I wanted so…


You need to



  1. Read the file back in if it’s there – otherwise create
  2. Add your item to the existing channel if it’s there – otherwise create
  3. Fix the date behaviour as RSS.NET always assumes UTC dates and appends ‘GMT’.  The problem here is that if you’re in Australia (like me) reading and rewriting the same items will effectively add several hours on to existing items every time, because you write the date you read back in for existing items (read and parse into region-specific date, then write back as is).  There’s two ways to fix this:

    1. Before you add your new item – loop through all items and change the item.PubDate to item.PubDate.ToUniversalTime().  This effectively sets it back to the ‘correct’ date.
    2. Change the RSSWriter class in RSS.NET to convert ToUniversalTime for the Item.PubDate, Channel.PubDate etc.  This seems like a better option, but it has potentially more knock on effects in RSS.NET.  I’m here to achieve a result, not change the behaviour (possibly adversely) of RSS.NET so I chose option 1

So here’s the code.  Not finished yet and rough around the edges, but works as I need.  The intention is to avoid the need for config files and configuring up of feeds specifically.  I just want a library function that’s called by a console app.  The web serving will simply be based on the location of the file and pointing to some folder in IIS.


        private static void WriteFeed(string feedFileName, string feedName, string feedDescription, 
        string feedURL, string itemTitle, string itemDescription, 
        DateTime itemPublishDate, 
string itemURL)
        {
            
bool newFeed = false;
            
//Try and first open the feed (to see if it’s existing)
            
RssFeed feed = null;
            try
            
{
                feed 
RssFeed.Read(feedFileName);
            
}
            
catch (FileNotFoundException ex)
            {
                feed 
= new RssFeed();
                
newFeed = true;
            
}
            
catch (Exception ex)
            {
                WriteError(ex)
;
                return;
            
}

            RssChannel channel 
= null;

            
//Loop through all channels and if we’ve got the same title reuse
            
for (int 0i < feed.Channels.Counti++)
            {
                
if (feed.Channels[i].Title == feedName)
                {
                    channel 
feed.Channels[i];
                    break;
                
}
            }

            
if (channel == null)
            {
                channel 
= new RssChannel();
                
feed.Channels.Add(channel)//might blow up if already there?
            
}

            RssItem item 
= new RssItem();

            
item.Title itemTitle;
            
item.Description itemDescription;
            
item.PubDate itemPublishDate.ToUniversalTime();
            
item.Link = new Uri(itemURL);

            
//To ensure we don’t screw up existing dates – convert to UTC
            
foreach (RssItem existingItem in channel.Items)
            {
                existingItem.PubDate 
existingItem.PubDate.ToUniversalTime();
            
}

            
//Now add our new item
            
channel.Items.Add(item);

            
channel.Title feedName;
            
channel.Description feedDescription;
            
//channel.LastBuildDate = channel.Items.LatestPubDate();
            
channel.PubDate DateTime.UtcNow;
            
channel.Link = new Uri(feedURL);

            
feed.Write(feedFileName);
        
}



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