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A top ten list from the home office in Redmond, Washington, presented at PDC 2005 in Los Angeles, urges developers to take advantage of RSS.

Bill Gates might be a fine keynote speaker, but the writers of the Windows Vista top ten aren't likely to make it to the Late Show with David Letterman anytime soon.

"The Top Ten Ways to Light Up Your Windows Vista Applications" put forth at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference suggest some ways the tech giant's horde of developers can best build applications for Windows Vista.

Number 8 on the list says "Bring data to the user with RSS." In Vista, RSS plays a big role, apparently more than just making RSS feeds easier to find in IE7 or other Microsoft applications:

Use the Windows Vista RSS feed APIs, common feedlist, shared data store, synch and parsing engines, and list extensions to RSS.

Windows Vista includes new RSS platform components that enable your application to easily consume RSS feeds.
Microsoft seems open to supporting both RSS and Atom standards. They list unified feed parsing support via API for RSS 0.9x, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom 0.3, and Atom 1.0. Further, Microsoft notes that if a user subscribes to a feed in one application, like IE7, "that feed will be available to all other applications."

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.