Check out the latest in the What will you Build series, it's just the beginning really, with more developer stories and code samples to come.  With Visualforce the promise of any device, any experience was not left to chance by our intrepid Dreamforce 2007 developer attendee, Elaine.   She was able (along with all the attendees) to get her Developer Edition enabled with Visualforce preview.  Elaine then set about to build her first Visualforce app for the BlackBerry 8800.  Read about the tips and tricks she discovered while hanging out in the Developer Lounge and building a Visualforce experience for the 8800.

Bruce Campbell's really cool five-minute video, which I'll refer to as "Then Everything Changed," is available for viewing on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbnCUqAL6UM) and Google Video (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4203254024312936284).

I hope you'll enjoy it, if you have not seen it already, and that you'll share the excitement it creates for delivering new enterprise capability in new ways.

The things you'll see at Dreamforce 2007, now bearing down on us the week after next, will totally change your perspective on what you can do with Web-facing development and on-demand application delivery. That said, I hope you'll never see a salesforce.com communication that claims to "make development easy."

We can, and will, drastically simplify all of the elements of application development that add no user value -- but destroy the user's illusion of simple and intuitive function unless they're done correctly. Going forward, this means that developers can focus a far larger share of their attention on the parts of application design that do add user value: the conception of rich and relevant data types, the crafting of complete and useful sets of operations against those abstract types, the creative integration of many views and functions into combinations that map well onto real-world tasks.

All of these are hard things to do well: we can hope, though, that we'll all do them better when we don't have to work so hard to glue together the toothpicks of raw APIs and fragmented infrastructure with a sticky mess of of low-level code.

Meanwhile, it's clear that salesforce.com is not the only company recognizing that this is the future of how applications will be built by developers and offered to users. We're one of very few to be betting our entire stack of chips on this proposition: observers such as Daniel Cummins, analyst at Bank of America, has impugned in no uncertain terms the "half-hearted participation in on-demand...by Oracle, Microsoft and SAP." But all of those companies, and many others besides, are recognizing that they have to have something in their portfolio that they can call an on-demand option if they want to stay relevant to developers.

Coming to Dreamforce is the best way to swim in the deep end of the pool of future developer talent: to be part of the group that knows the difference between the reality and the mere label of on-demand, and to be a resource for the skills and experience that will be scarce in years to come. I hope to see you there.

With the bits still just now cooling off from the Summer '07 release, it's hard to believe that the Dreamforce conference only four weeks away will still see some major new capabilities for developers on the salesforce platform.

Even so, as noted by Developer Marketing VP Adam Gross, the vast array of new features in Summer '07 were just the things that the platform team had to get out there to clear their decks for all the new things that Dreamforce will bring to that growing developer community.

It's critical for developers to realize that the salesforce platform is not new. It's been a possibility for almost eight years, and a vision for at least three years. It's the proven foundation of the SFA and CRM offerings that have made the company's reputation.

What's new is developer access to that foundation, making it possible to build a vast array of applications in every business-related task domain: applications that can enjoy the rapid time-to-market and the end-user efficiency and convenience of on-demand delivery.

Every business application developer, whether focused on small and medium business or striving for success at enterprise scale, should take advantage of the chance to connect at Dreamforce with the best technology and the most enthusiastic practitioners of what's to come.

Last year, Evans Data Research reported survey results indicating that 70% of developers expected to be involved in Web-related projects this year. If you're not already part of that group, it's likely that you soon will be.

Perhaps you plan to use the salesforce platform for your project, perhaps not -- but either way, September's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco represents a special opportunity to meet with developers who are in the vanguard of using rich APIs, orchestrating Web services, and composing powerful applications to attack key enterprise challenges.

I spoke with Benji Jasik, Senior Director of Product Management, about the breadth of content that developers will find at the Dreamforce event. Register now and be there next month.

As a telecommuter who hates the idea of actually going anywhere (unless it has really good concert halls or backpacking trails), I need to have a pretty good reason to urge you to come to a big-city convention center next month. I do, and it's strictly your business to know the reason I have in mind.

I mean that literally: it's your business. For the developer, the upcoming Dreamforce conference is more than a chance to talk with other next-gen application designers about the techniques that make the best use of the on-demand platform. It's also a chance to share the excitement, and maybe even pick the brains, of people who are recognizing that an on-demand plan is their best prospect for rapid time-to-market and low-cost access to serious buyers.

I spoke with salesforce.com product management director Jim Yu about the technical and the entrepreneurial sparks that will be flying in San Francisco during the week of September 16. When you hear what he says, and see the fire in his eye, I hope you'll want to be there.

There's a very special relationship between programmers and documentation, especially when we're talking about the definitive texts of the art. A mere passing reference, such as "That goes back to K&R" or "I'm sure you can find that in Knuth," marks both speaker and listener as cognoscenti: people whose one-name celebrities are Kernighan, Ritchie, and Knuth instead of Bono or Cher or Madonna.

Caroline Roth, a Senior Technical Writer at salesforce.com, may not yet be on the same top tier of programmer consciousness as Jon or Guy, but she radiates the same kind of enthusiasm for Apex Code that Bentley has for algorithms and that Steele has for Java or Lisp. As one of the authors of Creating On-Demand Applications: An Introduction to the Apex Platform (now in its second edition, and a free download for Apex Developer Network members), Caroline makes a strong case for why every developer with an eye on the Web should plan to attend this year's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this September.

For developers who are placing their bets on the Salesforce Platform, or for any developer who wants to stay abreast of the state of the art in building on-demand applications and being part of the community that creates them, this year's Dreamforce will be a breakout event. Register now.