It's been a while since my last blog post. Things have been very busy at BV Software and I'm excited about what we have planned for 2010.

•  BV Commerce 5.7 is currently finishing PCI compliance testing. I had hoped it would be ready before the end of the year but it will most likely be January before everything is officially certified. This is a free service update for anyone with the maintenance plan.
•  BV Commerce 6 is nearing its first beta version and I'm excited to be able to start to release some details. The entire core source code has been ported to C# and all future development will be in C#. That probably doesn't mean much to merchants but developers will want to be prepared. One of the main reasons for this is that c# is rapidly becoming the preferred .net language (other than dynamic languages like f#). The second reason is that Express versions of Visual Studio are single language only and when we standardize on C#, developers will be able to compile all projects using the free software.
• Originally, BV Commerce 6 was using ASP.NET MVC for the store pages but we kept webforms pages around. As development has progressed, webforms 4.0 is proving to be just as effective for most pages and much faster to work with since BV Commerce 5 is based on webforms and we have less to rewrite/test. There may be some MVC pages in BV Commerce 6 but if you're used to working with BV Commerce 5 you won't have to learn a whole new development system.
• BV Commerce 6 is on track for a spring 2010 release. It will be a free upgrade for all maintenance plan customers. 
• I'm not quite ready to release feature changes for BV Commerce 6 but the admin pages are getting streamlined and there are some nice new search features for the store side.
• The BV Commerce user conference planned for early 2010 has been postponed. The economic environment has made it difficult for many people to get travel budgets and I'm looking into the possibility of a webinar/virtual conference or scheduling an in-person conference for later in 2010 as the financial world improves.

BV Commerce has once again won the AspNetPro Magazine Reader's Choice Award for Best eCommerce application. That makes 4 out of the last 5 years that it has captured the title. An incredible achievement given the pace of innovation in the industry.

DotNetBB our message forum software has also captured the runner-up position for best asp.net forum software. 

It's been almost exactly 6 years since the very first release of BV Commerce. It was the very first commercial ecommerce software for the .NET platform and we're still going strong. I started writing the first version back in September of 2001 and it was released in February as soon as the .Net Framework 1.0 was official released.

I'm often asked "What does 'BV' stand for?" The truth is it could stand for a lot of things but "Best Value" is the answer I usually give. I went through tons of names but it seems like every domain name in the world related to commerce was taken back in 2001. Would you believe that even "jerboa" was taken? So "BVSoftware.com" was available and "Best Value" sounded good enough. If I called it "comrc" or some other misspelling I'd probably have $5M in VC money right now :-)

The BV Software logo has changed a lot since the first days too:  

The very first BV logo. I thought purple was a good choice!


The image of a methane molecule that served as a template for the next BV Logo

 
The very first "molecule" version of the BV logo.

The third BV logo with a 3D glossy molecule and more red!



A green version that never made it but did introduce the ITC Kabel font.

Current BV Software Logo
 

New design idea for dropping molecule symbol

I sold exactly 16 copies of BV Commerce 1.0. It didn't support choices or options and was all table based design. BV Commerce 2.0 followed less than 6 months later with a host of improvements and things have been growing non-stop since.

P.S. If you see Randy from GlobalWeb.net on the forums he was the very first BV Commerce customer and is still an active host/developer in our community!