We have made a huge leap ahead this past 2 weeks and have upgraded our core product AmeriCommerce and all supporting products and systems to use the newest version of Microsoft's .Net technology and Visual Studio 2005 the latest and greatest development environment.  Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 boast huge performance improvements and developer productivity gains of up to 30% and will undoubtedly lead to improvements in both the quantity and the quality of the code coming out of our development teams here at AmeriCommerce.  .Net 2.0 ushers in a new era of web development letting us natively use technologies such as Ajax (a way for small pieces of a page to communicate with a server rather than the whole page being posted back), Presentation frameworks, Work flow frameworks, new team systems that enhance collaboration between developers and so much more.

Many thanks for the beta customers out there who have helped with this upgrade and your patience throughout the upgrade process.  There are many new things planned including changing the admin to be snappier and quicker using these partial page postbacks, better theming support and just an overall refresh of the admin tool and options for the front end.  This upgrade was a major stepping stone and keeps us on the cutting edge of development tools and technologies, something our customers have come to expect and love about AmeriCommerce.  It would have been much easier to sit back under our older systems and grow comfortably at the cost of our customers' businesses, but we forged ahead cutting a clear path for the future of both our customers and AmeriCommerce.