My blog subscribers are still fairly small but growing and I'd like to send my appreciation to everyone who has subscribed. I'm going to give you a little preview of what BV has in store for 2009 and I'm not posting it anywhere else until much later.

This year I tried an experiment with BV Commerce pricing. Dropping the price from $999 to $499 but also separating out support. This was an effort to tie the cost of support directly to the amount of effort required by our team to provide the support. For those customers who don't use a lot of support they end up with a much cheaper software license. Those customers who need a lot of support time pay for it directly without the cost being spread among all BV customers. The experiment has worked pretty well but it doesn't address the other big variable cost: service packs.

Service Packs, upgrades and support questions over the years have led me to see there are two distinct groups of customers that use BV Commerce. The first group are merchants and non-programmers who are most interested in the business of running an online store. The second group are developers, hosts and tinkerers who use BV Commerce as a toolkit to create customized stores.

The merchant group is not interested in technical details like what language the software is written in, ssl certificates, IIS settings or load balancing. They just want a package that works out of the box and with a few minor theme changes is ready to go.

The developer group is very interested in the technical details and has specific technical goals for the software. They may want to customize a feature, create new layouts and themes from scratch or integrate parts of BV Commerce into an existing web site and just utilize the checkout process.

Sometime in 2009 I will be splitting BV Commerce into two distinct solutions. BV Commerce Service (BVC Service) and BV Commerce Toolkit (BVC Toolkit). BV Commerce Service is targeted to merchants who want a hosted application that is managed by BV Software and does not require any technical effort. BV Commerce Toolkit is the renamed BV Commerce of today with extended support and documentation options for developers. I've heard many times that developer documentation is lacking and one of the core focuses of the BVC Toolkit is extended samples and documentation for the APIs and source code.

I can already hear hosts and designers screaming that we're pulling a LaGarde and trying to kill off our partner channel. This isn't true for a couple of reasons. First, BV Commerce Service will only have a subset of the features in BV Commerce. The merchant group can live with a simplified feature set while they get a store started and can later upgrade to a custom solution using BVC Toolkit. Second, when the split happens we will no longer be providing consulting services or custom programming to merchants directly. We will refer all custom programming requests to our partner companies and anyone interested in BVC Toolkit will see our partner company's services promoted heavily. Third, BVC Service is NOT a replacement for BV Commerce. Existing BV Commerce customers who are hosted with our partner companies have no motivation or reason to switch to BVC Service. They are already getting more than what the service will provide from their current host. Fourth, BVC Service is just that, a service and not a software package. No source code or license is available and there will always be a large segment of customers who want to own a software license and/or control their own hosting environment.

As 2009 rolls around I'll be providing some more information about the new offerings.

In summary, the new BVC Service and BVC Toolkit solutions will offer better options for merchants and better options for developers. If you have any questions, concerns or comments feel free to respond to this blog post or fill out the contact form at BVSoftware.com.

JQuery is an open source javascript library that makes it easier to developer cross browser animations, css changes and AJAX callbacks. We've been using JQuery for a while for custom programming projects and on our own web site. It's a great library.

Microsoft just announced that their ASP.NET team was working on improving the built-in asp.net ajax javascript library and ultimately decided that JQuery was better than building their own from scratch. This is a huge change for Microsoft since their normal operating procedure is to duplicate another technology, give it away for free or an extremely low price and then add one or two "ringer" features that improve the product but make it incompatible with the original. In this instance they have committed to not only including JQuery but also to not fork the code base and instead include the standard library.

I applaud Microsoft's decision and I think it can be directly attributed to Scott Guthrie's advancement in the company. He was the guy behind the original ASP.NET product, one of the biggest success stories for Microsoft in recent years. ScottGu has done more to keep Microsoft in the web 2.0 game than anyone else I know of. 

I'm also excited to mention that JQuery will be included in BV Commerce 5.4. We've been working on the service pack for a long time now and JQuery was always scheduled to be included. Microsoft's announce means that we bet on the right horse and will be working to remove the Anthem.net ajax code in the future.

If you're a BV Developer (or just an ASP.NET developer) you should take a look a JQuery as it will become more important to you in the future.

There are still a lot of customers running on BVC 2004 (the version before BV Commerce 5). BVC 2004 was available as a single store or as a per-server license. Many hosts found the per-server license very attractive as it let them create an unlimited number of stores on a single machine. On of the license restrictions was that a per-server license is owned by the hosting company and customers would need to purchase a single store license to move elsewhere or to have source code access. This also meant that hosts could not charge clients for a "license" to BVC 2004 on a monthly basis as it would imply that they are purchasing ownership rights which the host has no legal right to sell.

Unfortunately, I know of more than a dozen unscrupulous web hosts who were/are charging customers a monthly "licensing" fee for BVC 2004. This is a main reason why we no longer offer a per-server license.

If you are a merchant running on BVC 2004 on your hosts per-server license you should NEVER have to pay anything for BVC 2004. You will have to pay normal hosting fees but your host should never try and sell you a license to BV Commerce.

If you are on a per-server license and need to move to another web host we are (for a limited time) allowing you to purchase a BV Commerce 5 license which will include the right to run a BVC 2004 store transfered from a per-server license. You'll also have the license for BV Commerce 5 should you decide to upgrade your store during the move.

Even before the PCI security standard for applications (PABP) becomes mandatory the PCI organization has retired it. It has been replaced with a new PA-DSS standard. The PCI web site details the  changes from PABP to PA-DSS.

One of the big changes is the PA-DSS is NOT required to process credit cards unless your credit card gateway/provider requires it. This should be a huge relief to many merchants as it will allow them to negotiate with their payment provider for a reasonable timeline to get certified.

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. 

If you've ever needed to get a quick export of everyone who has purchased from your store in the last year this SQL script can be used to generate a comma separated text file. Make sure you change the "> date" part to be the correct starting point for your export. You'll get customers' names, address, phone and email as long as they placed an order on your store.

 Run this in SQL Management Studio and then copy and paste the results to a text file. You can open the text file in Excel as "comma separated" (CSV) to get sort the data or mail merge.

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!

Visual Studio 2008 is almost released into the wild. Microsoft has promised that it will be available by the end of this month. One of the great new features of VS2008 is the ability to compile projects that target .Net 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5. This is the first time since Visual Studio moved over to .Net that the toolset supports multiple frameworks.

There is a catch. Even though you can compile a 2.0 project with VS2008 you'll have to upgrade the project/solution files to the VS2008 format. That means if one person on your dev team moves to VS2008, the entire dev team for that project must be on VS2008. 

 When should BV move to VS2008? We'll have some people on the first day it's available asking why we're not shipping a VS2008 project. We'll have other people two years down the road complaining if we no longer support VS2005. Thoughts?