It’s really sad, but true. Spammers hit trackbacks. Recently, you could prevent spam in comments by enforcing registration or adding a CAPTCHA or by simply enabling comment moderation. Now it’s getting harder and harder. Spammers post trackbacks links that lead people to their scummy web sites, most of them are porn web sites. In fact, I don’t think they are going to attract visitors to their web sites in this way, instead they are trying to increase their PageRank, I thinkl.

I’ve been blogging for about a half of a year. Everybody can comment on my posts, however comments have to be approved by me first, but I have never forced people to register or pass a CAPTCHA and I don’t remember receiving any spam posts until the recent times, when some Busby SEO Test started posting comments. I must admit it was a pretty clever bot, but it still generated scum comments.

Anyway, the amount of spam was pretty tolerable besides it has never gone approved. But everything changes. In the past two days, I’ve been getting spam posts disguised as trackbacks that is really nasty, because trackbacks don’t need to be approved, they become visible to visitors after they get posted.

It’s really unpleasant that such a useful service as the trackback can get a bad reputation because of the spam abuse.

After Googling for a while, I found out that this problem isn’t a new one, I came across the mentions of it that dated back to 2005, this basically means that I just didn’t face it, because I wasn’t a blogger.

So, it’s crucial to prevent trackback spamming, I wonder if anybody knows a good solutions that works with BlogEngine.NET 1.4.5. It’s also interesting to know who anyone fights with the trackback spam.

It’s the Christmas day today, so I want to congratulate everyone! Be happy :)!

I suppose you have already heard about the Entity Framework, but probably didn’t have a chance to try it in action. So, you want to learn it. Of course, you can start with MSDN that is indeed is the number one resource .NET developers, you can also find a dozen of tutorials on the Net, but you know it’s always pleasant to have a paper book or perhaps its electronic versions that you can read everywhere, not only in front of your computer.

So, I can recommend you a book that will help you start working with the Entity Framework straight away. The book has a simple title of “Entity Framework Tutorial” that suggests that it focuses strictly on practical appliance of the Entity Framework and contains many samples.

That is true. You’ll find a lot of useful samples in this book. In fact, you should really treat the book as a big tutorial that you usually find in the Internet, but this time it’s big enough to cover the most aspects of the Entity Framework and be published as a book.

It is written by Joydip Kanjilal – Microsoft MVP in ASP.NET who is known by his numerous publications on the reputable developers web sites, like www.aspnettoday, www.devx.com, www.aspalliance.com and many others. “Entity Framework Tutorial” is written in plain English and the book is generally not very long, just 228 pages, but is is enough to get started with the Entity Framework.

The book covers the essential topic including the following:

• The Entity Framework Architecture
• Mapping
• Working with Stored Procedures
• Ways of querying for data
  • Entity SQL
  • LINQ To SQL
• Object Service Layer and CRUD operations
• Finally, there is an example of building an ASP.NET application with the Entity Framework
• It also gives an introduction to ADO.NET Data Services

This is a good book in general, although it doesn’t provide the in-depth review of Entity Framework that you can still find on MSDN, instead “Entity Framework Tutorial” enables you to try and realize the power of the Entity Framework.

You can buy the book on the official web site of Packt Publishing.

Visual Studio 2010 CTP has been available for some time already. So, I guess many of you have already used a chance to give a new version of the famous IDE a try. If you haven’t downloaded it, well I think it’s quite sensible thing to get it. It’s likely to be released at the end of the next year, so you will have a plenty of time to learn all the new features and become a real guru of .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010.

Anyway, the current CTP is shipped as a Virtual PC image that means you cannot expect it run ultra fast. Moreover, the Virtual PC image is packaged with a lot of things that you may need when experiencing the new IDE, I mean they included Team Foundation Server, SQL Server 2008 Enterprise, Office 2007 and Windows Sharepoint Services that are running by default. Wow, that’s a lot and it consumes a lot of memory. But sometimes you don’t need those things at all, for instance, you just want to learn the new features of C# 4.0. Thus, it’s sensible to get rid of unnecessary services, you can always enable them later. So, go to Start –> Administrative Tools –> Services and simply stop and disable automatic running of the services you don’t need.

Personally, I disabled TFS, SQL Server, WSS, IIS, Tablet Input services. Eventually the memory consumption of my virtual machine dropped from about 1 GB to less than 500 MBs.