Announcing.... GetMyNews for Longhorn
I would post a screenshot, but there's not much to see. Rather, this is for your aural pleasure. GetMyNews vA1 listens for any of a set of commands listed in it's its (and that's one of my pet peeves) grammar file, NewsCommand.grxml, and will go out and hit an rss feed provided by http://googlenews.74d.com .
It will then read the headlines back to you text-to-speech style, while you can do other things. It listens and speaks via the Longhorn speech API, and the code is provided as a download for those interested. This is among my first steps in my eventual goal of an interactive rss reading program that lets you do other things while you can request news and listen in the background. Now that's multithreaded pc usage!