I was trying to use the excellent RSS Toolkit 2.0 to place my company's news on the main site at www.Falafel.com in order to allow me to enter news in one place only which is our support.falafel.com site and aggregate all from one place.

I grabbed the RSS feed from here and it was few minutes till I was able to get the RSS Toolkit 2.0 component to show up on the site with the same exact CSS styling and everything.

One thing that bothered me is the publication dates for the news were coming in as a long DateTime format, for example: Fri, 17 Aug 2007 21:52:35 -0700

I am used to fix these problems in the ASP.NET markup by using something like:

For some reason, that did not work this time.  As a matter of fact, no matter what I place in the second parameter, no change occurs.  I went back to the XML coming from the RSS feed and noticed that the pubDate is placed inside of a CDATA schema, which really means it is coming in as a string and it is way too late in the game to retrieve it differently.

Well, to fix this in your ASP.NET application, the easiest way is to do a double conversion on the fly from String to DateTime back to string in whatever format you desire.

<%# Convert.ToDateTime(Eval("pubDate")).ToLongDateString()%>