Accessing WordPress MySQL Database via Data Connection in Visual Studio 2010 using C#

There isn’t an RSS of the names of the categories specifically otherwise I would have used the XML from the RSS feed with XSLT to display the category list that way.

There is a handy function named add_feed(). You can create any feed or other output with it. Should be useful in your case. And it is pretty simple too.

Sample plugin

<?php
/**
 * Plugin Name: Category Feed
 * Description: XML output for the categories located on /catxml/
 */

add_action( 'init', array ( 'T5_Cat_Feed', 'init' ) );

class T5_Cat_Feed
{
    public static function init()
    {
        add_feed( 'catxml', array ( __CLASS__, 'display' ) );
    }

    public static function display()
    {
        $args = array(
            'hide_empty'               => 0,
            'hierarchical'             => 0,
            'taxonomy'                 => 'category'
        );
        $cats = get_categories( $args );

        if ( empty ( $cats ) or ! is_array( $cats ) )
        {
            return;
        }

        header( 'Content-Type: text/xml' );
        print '<categories>';

        foreach ( $cats as $cat )
        {
            $url = get_category_link( $cat->term_id );
            print "<category>
<name>$cat->cat_name</name>
<id>$cat->term_id</id>
<url>$url</url>
<description>$cat->category_description</description>
<parent>$cat->parent</parent>
<count>$cat->count</count>
</category>"
            ;
        }
        print '</categories>';
    }
}

Install as a plugin on your blog, visit the permalink settings page once to refresh the rewrite cache, and go to example.com/catxml/ or example.com/?feed=catxml. You get a simple XML file with category data here.