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.