Ok, I finally got fed up with all of the spam in my historical dasBlog postings. It's really embarrassing to send a link to a a colleague, only to have them snicker at all of the spam comments and trackbacks.

For those of you who don't know what a trackback is, it's basically an acknowledgement that enables authors to keep track of who is linking to, or referring to their articles. When used properly, trackbacks form a communication link between the two blogs, so that new comments on one blog can basically ping the other, allowing readers to easily follow discussions on both. The problem is that spammers have abused this mechanism and bloggers end up with trackbacks and pingbacks to various gambling, herbal medication, and adult sites.

Earlier this year I joined the ranks, and disabled my trackback and pingback services in dasBlog. I then followed Scott Hanselman's advice on using Akismet spam blocking service.

The big effort was then how to cleanup the <Comment> and <Trackback> elements that were spam, so, like others before me, I built a tool to assist with this.

1. Download ScrubDasBlog.zip or ScrubDasBlogSource.zip to your hard drive
2. Edit the blacklist.txt to include your own blacklisted URLs *
3. Backup your existing feedback files: \content\*.dayentry.xml
4. Run the ScrubDasBlog utility, specifying the path to your \content folder and the path to your blacklist.txt file, for example:

scrubdasblog c:\inetpub\wwwroot\mydasblog\content c:\scrubdasblog\blacklist.txt

* If you have predominately more SPAM comments and trackbacks in your dasBlog history, then you can generate a starter blacklist by going into your \content sub-folder and typing the following:

type *.xml | find "AuthorHomepage" > blacklist.txt

After you generate the blacklist.txt file, you should remove any good sites and remove any duplicates, before running the ScrubDasBlog utility.

I would recommend downloading the Source code version and reading through my code. Please comment on any improvements you might make.

Last month at Tech-Ed, I asked many of my SharePoint friends, and a few vendors, how to do this. I got answers ranging from "You can't" to "You'll need to buy our utility". They all told me that I should just add the content database back to my SharePoint instance and then use the WebDav or some other utility (sometimes commercial) to extract the documents in bulk. This wouldn't work, because I had upgraded to WSS 3.0 and this was a WSS 2.0 database. Well, it may have worked, but I was saving it as a final option.

Instead, I searched the Web and found a posting by Mark Jen where he posted the code on how to do this. His code does what I suspected was possible - just rip through the items in the dbo.Docs table, and stream out the Content fields. It handles the creation of the folders as well!

Thanks Mark!

While enjoying the fireworks yesterday in Oceanside, California with my friend Scott Cate, he let me know about a CodePlex project called Terminals.

Terminals is simply a wrapper, around the Terminal Services ActiveX Client (mstscax.dll) and provides multi-tab interface - which can be very handy when remoted-in to multiple servers at once. Also, it supports screen resolution up to 4096x2048, clipboard, drag & drop into the session, and some other nice features.

Yet another Architect MVP has bitten the dust, to join the cooler crowd over here under the Team System MVP banner.

Martin Danner is an experienced developer, project manager, and consultant in the software and information technology field, Danner has an extensive history in the software engineering field. He worked as a senior software engineer at Micron Technology, where he developed applications for the Web and PC, and he managed a group responsible for configuration management and software quality for all corporate software systems. Danner has also worked as a software engineer, developer, and consultant for Northrop Corporation and Price Waterhouse. Danner earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. He is a Microsoft Solution Architect MVP, a Microsoft Certified Solution Developer for the .NET Framework (MCSD.NET), as well as a PMI Project Management Professional (PMP).

It wasn't too long ago that Jeff Levinson defected from the Architect MVP camp. What is going on over there?

Talk about "community-driven", Lorin Thwaits and the other coordinators of the Desert Code Camp are wanting your input on when 'camp should be held this next year.

You can choose between dates in September and October.

Bookmark this page. For the next several weeks, Scott Golightly (Microsoft Regional Director from Utah) and I will be publishing several instructional videos around Team System.

Currently, there are two videos posted:

• How Do I: Customize TeamPlain?
• How Do I: Create Custom Work Items in Team Foundation Server?

More coming each week. Stay tuned ...

I saw a demo of these at Tech-Ed, and thought I would share with my friends.

Essentially, the Database Operations team at Microsoft uses a suite of jobs on all their servers for performing backups, automated database maintenance, improve performance , and improving disaster recovery. I'm sure every SQL Server expert/consultant out there has his or her own bag of tricks, but Microsoft is finally sharing theirs.

These SQL maintenance jobs provide automated tasks such as database or transaction logs backup, performing database optimization like Index defrag or update statistics, cleaning MSDB backup history and recycling the SQL error log. Each of these jobs runs stored procedures that are installed when the jobs are created.

The following are the jobs get installed with this package.

• SQLBackupAll
• SQLBackupDiffAll
• SQLBackupTranAll
• SQLBackupChecker
• SQLDBCCAll
• SQLIndexDefragAll
• SQLUpdateStatistics
• SQLCleanupMsdbBackupHistory
• SQLCycleErrorLog

Download the automation jobs here, and then refer to the Word document inside.

This week Microsoft released the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server – Project Server 2007 connector as a CodePlex project. The project has been up for a few weeks, but is now being broadly advertised.

The TFS-PS2007 connector is designed to integrate the project management capabilities of TFS with Project Server 2007. It's been developed by the Visual Studio Team System Rangers in response to significant customer demand for a connector solution. Future versions of Team System will have native integration with Project Server, in the meantime this Connector solution is the best way to integrate the two Microsoft products. This solution builds on the previous PS2003 VSTS Connector, published on GotDotNet.

I apologize for the delay, but if you attended our PRCN05 pre-conference last week at Tech-Ed, you might be interested in downloading our demo files.

I just learned about this neat editor for creating and editing Windows Installer packages (.msi files) and merge modules (.msm files). Orca is just one of many cool installer tools by Microsoft. It provides a graphical interface for validation, highlighting the particular entries where validation errors or warnings occur. This KB255905 article explains more.

Orca is part of the platform SDK and locating the correct download was difficult - a lot of redirected pages and dead ends, but I found it as part of the Vista SDK download as well as the Windows Server 2003 SDK download. Once you install the SDK, look for Orca.msi and install it separately.

Here is a screenshot of running Orca on the Orca.msi file ...

What a great week. I saw many friends ...

attended many parties ...

and learned a few new things ...

One of the technologies I heard about was Windows Live Writer, which provided me the ability to write blog posts offline, such as I'm doing right now!

Please plan on attending the 14 June meeting of the Greater Idaho SharePoint User Group.

This month’s topic is Workflow in SharePoint. We will be having a presentation by Ben Hickman of Microsoft on the built in WorkFlow functionality and then some presentations by K2 around using K2 Workflow in SharePoint and more specifically about Administrative enhancements in the latest K2 release as it applies to MOSS 2007. They will also be highlighting the administrative aspects of their new product BlackPearl. There will be more in depth developer discussions after the main block for those interested in diving deeper into workflow development concepts, as interest merits.

Visit the Meetings page for the agenda and other logistic details.

If you go, be sure to say hi to Scott Shepherd and thank him for coordinating the user group!

Have you seen this yet? I caught a quick news story this morning on TV about Microsoft Surface.

Here's an article from the July 2007 issue of Popular Mechanics. There's a really cool video of Microsoft Surface on page 1 and on the interface on page 3 of that article.

BTW - I understand that the technology behind Surface is WPF.

Microsoft (and others) had announed that its Fall Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) would be October 2-5, in Los Angeles. Yesterday, they canceled the event and are in the process of rescheduling it.

From their site:

We are currently in the process of rescheduling this fall’s Professional Developer Conference. As the PDC is the definitive developer event focused on the future of the Microsoft platform, we try to align it to be in front of major platform milestones. By this fall, however, upcoming platform technologies including Windows Server 2008, SQL Server codenamed “Katmai,” Visual Studio codenamed “Orcas” and Silverlight will already be in developers’ hands and approaching launch, which is where we’ll focus our developer engagement in the near term. We will update this site when we have a new date for the PDC that is better timed with the next wave of platform technologies.

Welcome to Camp! Portland Code Camp 3.0 (as was 2.0) is being hosted at the gorgeous WSU Vancouver campus.

There are quite a few attendees here. I counted around 90 at this morning's welcome session.

Click the above to zoom-in

As for my SQL Server 2005 Worst Practices talk, if you'd like to download the slides, code, or sample project, please click here.

Google Analytics has been re-designed to help you learn even more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. The new Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Best of all, Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.

All you need to do is paste some tracking code (a small snippet of Javascript) into each Web page that you want tracked, and you're done. You can then track your activity through the built-in reports.

Read more about the makeover here.