With the advent of .NET 3.5 SP1 and Microsoft’s decision to support the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) for services offered by Microsoft's Live Platform, AtomPub is gaining momentum in the .NET world. In addition BlogSvc.net, an AtomPub server for WCF and .NET, features an implementation of the AtomPub protocol based on a provider model.
BlogSvc.net is an open source project hosted on CodePlex and started by Jarret Vance:
BlogSvc is an open source implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol. It is built on top of a provider model. There are providers for the file system and databases. The service is compatible with Live Writer.
BlogSvc is written in C# 3.5, uses the new web programming model in WCF, and relies heavily on LINQ and other new language features. BlogSvc can be used with or without IIS.
Since BlogSvc.net has been written before the official release of .NET 3.5 SP1, it provides its own implementation of a syndication object model. As Steve Maine has announced, Microsoft also “added strongly-typed OM for all of the constructs defined in the Atom Publishing Protocol specification (like ServiceDocument and Workspaces) and put them in the System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace”.
Steve and Scott Hanselman point out that Jarret might profit from the ServiceDocument and Workspace classes, i.e. the syndication object model in System.ServiceModel.Syndication, and “be able to remove most of his "BlogService.Core" project”. Read the details in Scott’s article, which also offers a brief analysis of BlogSvc.net’s code.
In spite of many articles, which partially reduce BlogSvc.net and Syndication/AtomPub support in .NET Framework 3.5 (SP1) to a means of implementing content management systems or blog engines, AtomPub offers a much wider area of application. In an interview, available on InfoQ, Dan Diephouse talks about the benefits of using the Atom Pub and Atom standards for business applications.