Because they are letting Rob Conery spend most all of his time educating us on MVC, TDD, mocking, scalable architecture, Linq, the (his) repository pattern, pipes and filters, IQueryable, dependency injection, and plenty more for FREE to you and me.

13 installments into Rob's MVC Storefront series and we readers/viewers have been beneficiaries of 5 plus hours of screencasts on overdrive. Rob not only jams a ton of information into his fast paced presentations, but he has also been including rich "interviews" with some of the brightest and best at Microsoft as he transparently carries us through and includes us in his decision making process. Then there are the discussions carried on in the blog comments and now forums where the community calls Rob out on issues, offers suggestions, and most importantly teaches me SO much.

Which brings me to the heart of what I'm loving about this series, what I find to be the best and most refreshing aspect: the character and attitude of Rob and his teammates. How they go about their business is more important than whether or not you know how to use dependency injection. 

I get the feeling that once the recording stops these guys aren't backbiting and ridiculing one another. They seem to genuinely like each other, or at least respect each other.

Rob isn't working as an island, but he's working "agile" including his clients, the community, and his teammembers all along the way.

And it's not just Rob, but it's Scott Guthrie (who I suspect sets the tone for this behavior), Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, Joe Stagner, Ayende Rahien ... and these are just the guys I know of. These guys love what they do and they don't seem to have a bone of elitism in any of them. Check out the tone of the blog entries below.

Phil Haack - The Design is Never Right the First Time

Scott Hanselman - Professionalism, Programming, and Punditry and Success as A Metric 

I can't count the number of times I've heard one of them write or talk about Ruby or Java or some other non-Microsoft technology. For a good while I was reading the blogs of a few ASP.NET developers who were abandoning ASP.NET for Ruby on Rails, sentiments I understood and at times shared. And then the community got the ear of the ASP.NET team and now we are all evaluating the MVC bits. 

Contrast that to a Ruby on Rails user group meeting I attended where the first 20 minutes were spent ridiculing (all in good fun, but still) other web technologies one by one. 

Clearly, my title was in jest to get attention. What Microsoft is doing with their team seems to be working. It's certainly working on me; my passion for ASP.NET development has been rekindled.  And greater than the FREE training we are getting on the why's and how's of the technology, we are receiving a phenomenal education on how to function as developers within a team and a community.

Other great resources on this topic:
The Pragmatic Programmer
Practices of an Agile Developer
And any of the blogs listed in the blogroll on this page 

Client: Northstar Church
URL: www.northstarchurch.cc
Design: Becky Siegrist @ C1 Design

Overview

Northstar Church has fantastic design and needed to translate that to their outdated website. Currently, they maintain their content with Adobe Contribute. They didn't want to do a complete overhaul of the site implementing a new CMS, and figured a skin refresh would give them legs to make it until next year before pursuing a a bigger project.

Task 1 - Reskin
The old design was circa January 2007 and thankfully was pretty nice box model CSS. The new design matched up well, and with minor tweaks to the template I translated Becky's wonderful design from Photoshop files.

The major addition to the layout was a link laiden footer to provide sitemap-esque access to all content on the site.

Task 2 - Homepage Spotlight
Part of the revamped home page design is a rotating feature section. For this I leveraged Flex to build the flash player that transitions the features, triggers the ajax call that refreshes the matching sidebar content, and provides a controller for the user to toggle between features.

Task 3 - Video / Photo Features
Northstar Church also has fantastic video production and needed a way to present them consistently from anywhere in the site. This is a perfect scenario for SlideShowPro and SlideShowProDirector. SSP not only delivers the content in a skinnable, beautiful interface, but SSPD makes updating and maintaining the content very accessible for Northstar.

Users can browse the entire gallery of media albums, and peppered throughout the site are links directly to specific media. So, if Northstar wants to launch the video popup and play the Vision video bypassing the rest of the content, then they can do just that. I LOVE this tool because it has the APIs that I need to milk the technology, and it has the easy to use interface for my client.

To see this in action hit the Vision Video feature link on the Northstar Church home page. 

Task 4 - RSS News
As with most churches, you have an abundance of news and events. Northstar Church is located in Frisco, Texas and caters to a tech saavy crowd, so adding an RSS feed was a no brainer. The current hosting supported PHP, and we really needed just a simple blogging solution that could be easily skinned to match the new design. Enter the all famous WordPress. Just like SlideShowPro, WordPress is easy for non-techy use.

Installing WordPress is generally a snap, but each webhost has its quirks. WordPress installation is basically a simple 2 step dance: 1) create a blank mySql database, 2) upload WordPress and hit it. WordPress walks you through the initial config and you've got your blog. This webhost is PowWeb and the problem was that WordPress couldn't connect to the database - bad server address. The control panel didn't have the server address visible and suggestions in the forums were wrong, but after a few emails back and forth with support we had this resolved. I'm so glad I stayed away from the hosting business.

Since we had the main site at the root, it made sense to setup WordPress in a sub directory: http://www.northstarchurch.cc/news/

Task 5 - Spread the Word
With a young, tech strong congregation, Northstar wanted to provide a way to their members to "spread the word" on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Eventful, and anywhere else they might drop a badge of the appropriate size and shape. 

In addition to website banners, Northstar offers downloads for desktop wallpaper, instant messenger icons, and email banners. When you have great design, why not.

Conclusion

SEO is a key component to any website's life, and we've also done plenty of that. For a simple redesign, I'm very happy with how this has turned out. I'm always evaluating tools to find the best options not only for myself as developer, but for my clients. In this instance WordPress and SlideShowProDirector fit very nicely.