I could tell you that Rob’s a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, or I could tell you that he’s been blogging for an impressive 6 years now. I could, but wouldn’t you rather know of the cool things Rob’s been doing for the developer community?

Back in the day Rob created the Commerce Starter Kit, now know as dashCommerce and lead by Chris Cyvas of Mettle Systems, a great source of information on how to build e-Commerce applications. He also heads the team which is developing SubSonic, which is described as a “Super High-fidelity Batman Utility Belt” on their website or more commonly known as an open-source data access layer generator with a cool feature set :)

But that’s not all! For the past 9 months Rob’s been working on a new open source commerce application, known as the MCV Storefront. This time Rob decided to screencast the development process, starting from day 1.

It’s being built on the new ASP.NET MVC framework and Rob set out to learn TDD by bravely exposing himself to the community, fully aware that his progress would be monitored by the TDD purists. The series is an awesome project and currently stands at 25 recoded episodes and he frequently has guest appearances by experts in their fields, may times the authors of the frameworks he uses. If you want to learn ASP.NET MVC, you definitely should check it out!

What got you into blogging?

Not sure really. I liked the idea of being able to write ideas online and to also keep a "journal" of sorts. Eventually I realized that if I blogged my ideas and discoveries, I would have a really nice place to look at how I did things before- which has worked out pretty nicely. It happens pretty often where I look up an old blog post to see how I wrote a query or LINQ statement :)

What keeps you motivated as a blogger?

People let me know that what I write occasionally helps them - that's pretty good motivation. I also like to write and it gives me an excuse to be creative.

What profile do you try and give your blog?

I try to entertain and inform, mostly entertain though. Writing is tough and I realize people are giving me some minutes out of their day and it better be worth it, so I pay a lot of attention to style and substance.

How has blogging affected the way you work?

A lot. I have my current job due to my blog :)

How has blogging affected the developer community?

If you're asking about my blog - hard to say really. Blogging in general, however, has been tremendously helpful to the developer community. 9 times out of 10 I find answers to technical challenges in blogs - almost never MSDN :) which I think is funny.

How has blogging affected the software companies?

It really helps them support their products, and as you can see companies like Microsoft really benefit from high profile bloggers like Dare Obasanjo, Phil Haack, and Scott Hanselman. Oh yah - and ScottGu :)

Should employers encourage their developers to blog?

Absolutely. But they also need to recognize the freedom of the blogger. Microsoft is great in this regard - I can write whatever I want to write about - they're quite tolerant. You can't say that about a lot of tech companies :). If you stifle what the person is capable of writing, you sound like a mouthpiece, which is boring.

How do you think blogging will evolve over the next couple of years as a tool for developers?

Bigger and more important.

Do you have any success stories where blogging helped you in a project?

Sure - the MVC Storefront is based on the foundation of blogging. So far it's been a very big success!

I’ve been tracking the MVC Storefront project for a long time now and it was fantastic to get the opportunity to have Rob participate in my interview series, thank you Rob!

This interview is part of a series of interviews I’ve conducted on the subject of blogging and software development. You can read more about it here