Well, I'm a bit late to the party... but as Scott announced, dasBlog 1.7 is finished. There are numerous and substantial improvements in this version. Some of them were done months ago, and the most substantial came in the last 2 months as Scott and I feverishly whipped dasBlog into a fast asp.net app. We hope we've also given folks the tools to help combat referral and comment spam.

Anyhoo, here is the 411:

• dasBlog is no longer hosted on GotDotNet, and has new home at SourceForge.net. Using CVS as source control actually makes it a joy to check in code to dasBlog.
• New Features
• Release Notes
• YOU MUST UPGRADE your content folder. This is *not* and XCOPY deployment. There were two major bugs fixed in the dasBlog runtime that require that the dasBlog files be rebuilt. Unfortunately there was no avoiding this. Read the instructions in the DasBlogUpgrader download.
• For most other details see the wiki

Anyway, I learned a lot about asp.net, programming and dasBlog working on this release. It was really fun and I look forward to working on 1.8 :-).

Some of my favorite 1.7 features

• All the search bot referrals to your site are "pretty printed" in your logs
• CAPTCHA for entering comments
• MovableType Blacklist and Content based Blacklist for visitors to the site
• <%ReferralListFiltered()%>Macro that will shrink the number of referrals displayed in the Permalink and expose the rest using javascript and css.
• Performance
• Lots of smart Caching
• Trackbacks/Pingbacks work reliably.

update: if you happen to use dasBlog to do any CrossPosting (post to another blog from dasBlog) DO NOT CrossPost in 1.7. I just found a bug that causes dupes. If you want a fix and can't wait for .2 (which will of course fix these types of things) leave a comment and I will send you an updated patch (one dll).