The last month has been one of the busiest for the team ever. But, I am pleased to report that Commerce Server 2006 is now feature complete – finally! This is the culmination of 3+ years of efforts from multiple projects finally coming together into a single deliverable that I hope will be the best and most revolutionary release of e-commerce and self-service technologies from Microsoft yet.

In Microsoft-speak, feature complete means that all features have been completely built to specification and that we have our first level of test coverage passing in all areas. During the same time, we also migrated our code-base and testing to the RTM versions of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. At this point, the march to our Beta release before the holidays is on. Now that the features are done the team is in hardcore testing, documentation writing, and stabilization mode to make sure that the Beta release is of very high quality and that all features are working well. To answer the obvious question, there will not be an interim drop between Tech. Preview 2 and Beta – but Beta is now not *that* far away.

Now that I personally am coming up for some air, look forward to some postings going through all the features and functions to see what you can look forward to in the near future. I have also gone through all the comments and questions and will be posting responses to all of these as well. Be seeing you!