The new version of ERPConnect was released in March 2008. The list below describes the main new features.
Of course all customers with valid update-subscription will get it for free.

String, XString and XML data types

String, XString and XML data types are supported. These data types doesn't have a defined length as the traditional data types like CHAR or NUMC. They may grow to an unlimited length. As the String data type is created for delivering textual content the XString data type may be used for binary data.

LINQ to SAP

To find out more about LINQ to SAP and the Visual Studio 2008 integration please have a look here.

Support for .NET 3.5

Besides the well know assemblies ERPConnect.dll (for .NET 1.1) and ERPConnect20.dll (for .NET 2.0) there is a new assembly ERPConnect35.dll which is optimized for usage under .NET 3.5.

Performance improvement by caching

With the help of the property R3Connection.CacheMetadata (true/false) there might be a performance boost in some situations. When the same connection calls the same function module thousands of times and the cache is enabled the meta data will be reused and not requeried from SAP.