Commerce Server 2007 RC1 Released

Today is a very exciting day for the Commerce Server team -- at about 5:15pm they announced availability of CS07 RC1 bits.  I'm personally excited to have CS responsibility on my team and begin deeper engagements with enterprise e-commerce.  The CS07 release is monumental --  read about all the details on Ryan Donovan's (PUM of CS) blog post.

Key highlights:

Today’s Release Candidate marks the most revolutionary release of e-commerce technology in Microsoft’s history. It represents the culmination of several years of engineering efforts, highlighted by:

• Pervasive Services Oriented Architecture via ASP.NET 2.0 Web Services
• Integrated Application Integration (via BizTalk Server 2006 Adapters) for Line-of-Business & B2B Trading Partner Interoperability
• World-class flexibility with Catalogs – there isn’t much you can’t model anymore including difficult aggregation and seasonal merchandizing scenarios
• Integrated, Transactional Staging/Deployment
• Extraordinary performance – we can run a simulated Top 10 Retail+ peak e-commerce volume on 4 Web/2 low-end SQL servers
• Full integration with ASP.NET 2.0 and Visual Studio 2005
• The best implementation of e-commerce basics (Catalogs, Inventory, Marketing, & Orders + reporting capabilities) to-date

Download the bits on https://connect.microsoft.com/.
Details at: https://blogs.msdn.com/rdonovan/archive/2006/05/19/602259.aspx