We landed in Boston along with thousands of people from all around the world who had come to run the Boston Marathon.  But the more than 500 Force.com customers, partners and developers who joined us at the Tour de Force event had a different goal in mind: to learn how to build apps on the Force.com platform.

Salesforce administrators and developers got really excited, not only because they were able to attend Tour de Force for free and attend sessions tailored for them, but they were able to go to the DevZone Immersion Lab, pick up the Force.com Workbook, sit at one of the Apple Macs, log into their own “free Developer Edition account” and learn about Force.com Builder, Force.com IDE, Apex Code, Visualforce and Force.com Code Share while building a simple mileage tracker app in a short time between sessions.

As I was talking to folks at the early evening reception in the DevZone, many of them were telling me they had realized the power of the Force.com platform and ideas were sparking in their minds, from building new business solutions for their company to building their own software-as-a-service businesses by developing Force.com apps to sell.

If you were not able to take advantage of the educational experience as part of the 1st leg of the Tour de Force, watch for the next set of Tour de Force events coming to a city near you.

Meanwhile, you can go to "Getting Started" on the Force.com Developer Community site.

Ahh, New York!  As a guy who grew up in the North Jersey suburbs and lived a few years in Brooklyn, New York City feels like home to me.  I rode the A train through Brooklyn from JFK, walked up Broadway to the park, had a pastrami sandwich and Dr. Brown's for dinner, and fell asleep to the noise of street construction 17 stories below on 53rd street -- it's all good!

And even better will be today's Tour de Force event.  Marc Benioff is here to lead the keynote, and we're expecting well north of 600 attendees -- the DevZone is going to be as busy as Sheep Meadow on the first warm and sunny Saturday in an NYC April. We're building on the momentum and energy we generated in Atlanta and Chicago, so this promises to be the best event yet.  And with a bigger set of sessions -- nine across our three tracks -- we're taking the New York community even deeper into Force.com.  It's going to be a great day.

The Tour de Force team just landed in Chicago for the next stop on the Tour tomorrow, April 10th. Earlier this week on Tuesday, over 300 attendees came out to the Atlanta Tour de Force event. Highlights included hearing the latest Force.com platform news and seeing apps that ISVs and customers like Riskonnect, CODA, and Delta Airlines were building using platform technologies. Many attendees also got the chance to attend breakout sessions that covered topics like Apex and Visualforce and later roll up their sleeves to work on Force.com app building exercises in the Dev Zone. If you happen to be in the Windy City, stop by and say hello to see what we have in store for you! Marc Benioff will be keynoting and you’ll have many opportunities during the day to get technical questions answered and meet the Force.com evangelist team (see pic of Ron Hess and Dave Carroll working hard at the airport). We've been busy preparing content, code samples, labs and demos over the past months and look forward to meeting everyone in Chi-town and discovering where the best place is for deep-dish pizza!

Last few weeks have been really busy as our Force.com team member, Nick Tran worked on creating the Force.com lab tutorials. With the help from the Force.com R&D team and the evangelists we got them tested, just in time for us to get them printed and delivered to the Tour de Force Atlanta DevZone Lab.

Nick and I landed in Atlanta late afternoon and got to the Hyatt Regency Atlanta to setup the DevZone Lab systems so that it is ready for your use tomorrow. We are really excited about the new lab tutorials as we have tutorials for folks that have a salesforce.com admin background and would like to build an app using the Force.com AppBuilder. For those of you who are developers, you will want to take advantage of the tutorials that will teach you how to write an app using the Force.com IDE, Apex code and Visualforce. We will also have a team of Force.com experts to help you with the tutorials and get your technical questions answered.

The DevZone will be open the whole day starting at 9am. Please stop by to pick up the Force.com Workbook, get some hands-on to build your first app!

For the folks attending Tour de Force Atlanta, see you in the morning. If you are not close to Atlanta, check out the next set of Tour de Force cities.

-Nick Tran and Kavindra Patel

I got confirmation today that the official Tour de Force 18-wheeler with all our gear, signage, and extra-large supply of Force.com goodies is rolling on down the highway on its way to Atlanta for our next event on April 8…  so this tour is officially on the road! 

It's Friday now, but all week the entire team has been extremely busy working on session slides, some very cool demos, new lab content and of course finalizing all the details that will make this our next great event.  But that’s all fully baked and in the can now, so we get a little relaxation and time to pack before heading out Monday.  Which reminds me: I need to remember to bring extra batteries for the Wii controllers (yes, the Wii Golf Tournament continues as a Tour de Force DevZone tradition).

Oh, and if you should happen to see the Tour de Force semi out on the interstate on its way to Atlanta, or to Chicago, New York, or Boston after that, be a good buddy and post your pic to Flickr with the tag tdf08.  I’m dying to see a shot of the truck, as well as any other Tour photos.  And if Flickr glory alone isn’t enough motivation for you, I’ve got some nice developer.force.com t-shirts, jackets, and other schwag set aside to reward the best photo posts.

Hope to see you in Atlanta.