Videos from Tour de Force Dublin

by Jon Mountjoy on June 30, 2008 at 11:46 AM

I've just spent the day at Tour de Force here in Dublin, where I had a spectacular time meeting prospective developers, ISVs, clients, partners, system admins and folk such as CODA and Fairsail.

The web team here in EMEA created a few videos highlighting some of the activities of the day. So thanks to Mark Stanley, Kieran Guckian, Fintan Lillis, Aonghus Flynn and Stephanie Robotham for these vids!



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Announcement of Google Data APIs on Force.com

by Jon Mountjoy on June 23, 2008 at 09:00 AM

The Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs has just been announced here at Tour de Force Santa Clara. The goal of the toolkit is to make Google App services, starting with Spreadsheets, Documents and Calendar, first class citizens of the Force.com environment. I got my hands on the toolkit yesterday and wrote a little integration app. Essentially I created events on my Google Calendar from within my Force.com app, and listed those events too. Here's what the code looked like to list events: 
CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
GoogleData.Calendar cal = service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
GoogleData feed = service.getFeed( cal.alternate );
for( xmldom.element e: feed.entries) 
 titles.add(new MyEvent(e.getValue('title'), e.getValue('content')));
As you can see, it takes about 5 lines of code to connect to a calendar and iterate through the events. Creating an event is similarly straightforward: 
 CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
 service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
 GoogleData.Calendar cal = 
     service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
 Event ee = new Event(
   subject = 'Cool new Event',
   description = 'Clouds in the sky',
   ActivityDateTime = system.now(),
   DurationInMinutes = 120
 );
service.insertEvent(cal, ee);
The only part that requires brain cycles in getting any of this to work was the authentication structure, which is part of the Google Data API architecture. Essentially you (as the Google Calendar user, for example) have the authenticate your application with Google, which requires a few page redirects and token exchanges. At the end of the day you end up with a token that you use in all subsequent interactions (see the fetchToken() above). There's plenty of documentation (and test coverage) to get you going, and as the code is open source you can go and scrabble around for yourself too. Here are all the bits: This opens the door to a lot of opportunities, so get coding! Update 2008-June-24: See Ryan's post on this over on the Google Data API Blog.

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Announcement of Google Data APIs on Force.com

by Jon Mountjoy on June 23, 2008 at 09:00 AM

The Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs has just been announced here at Tour de Force Santa Clara. The goal of the toolkit is to make Google App services, starting with Spreadsheets, Documents and Calendar, first class citizens of the Force.com environment. I got my hands on the toolkit yesterday and wrote a little integration app. Essentially I created events on my Google Calendar from within my Force.com app, and listed those events too. Here's what the code looked like to list events: 
CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
GoogleData.Calendar cal = service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
GoogleData feed = service.getFeed( cal.alternate );
for( xmldom.element e: feed.entries) 
 titles.add(new MyEvent(e.getValue('title'), e.getValue('content')));
As you can see, it takes about 5 lines of code to connect to a calendar and iterate through the events. Creating an event is similarly straightforward: 
 CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
 service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
 GoogleData.Calendar cal = 
     service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
 Event ee = new Event(
   subject = 'Cool new Event',
   description = 'Clouds in the sky',
   ActivityDateTime = system.now(),
   DurationInMinutes = 120
 );
service.insertEvent(cal, ee);
The only part that requires brain cycles in getting any of this to work was the authentication structure, which is part of the Google Data API architecture. Essentially you (as the Google Calendar user, for example) have the authenticate your application with Google, which requires a few page redirects and token exchanges. At the end of the day you end up with a token that you use in all subsequent interactions (see the fetchToken() above). There's plenty of documentation (and test coverage) to get you going, and as the code is open source you can go and scrabble around for yourself too. Here are all the bits: This opens the door to a lot of opportunities, so get coding! Update 2008-June-24: See Ryan's post on this over on the Google Data API Blog.

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Announcement of Google Data APIs on Force.com

by Jon Mountjoy on June 23, 2008 at 09:00 AM

The Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs has just been announced here at Tour de Force Santa Clara. The goal of the toolkit is to make Google App services, starting with Spreadsheets, Documents and Calendar, first class citizens of the Force.com environment. I got my hands on the toolkit yesterday and wrote a little integration app. Essentially I created events on my Google Calendar from within my Force.com app, and listed those events too. Here's what the code looked like to list events: 
CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
GoogleData.Calendar cal = service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
GoogleData feed = service.getFeed( cal.alternate );
for( xmldom.element e: feed.entries) 
 titles.add(new MyEvent(e.getValue('title'), e.getValue('content')));
As you can see, it takes about 5 lines of code to connect to a calendar and iterate through the events. Creating an event is similarly straightforward: 
 CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
 service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
 GoogleData.Calendar cal = 
     service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
 Event ee = new Event(
   subject = 'Cool new Event',
   description = 'Clouds in the sky',
   ActivityDateTime = system.now(),
   DurationInMinutes = 120
 );
service.insertEvent(cal, ee);
The only part that requires brain cycles in getting any of this to work was the authentication structure, which is part of the Google Data API architecture. Essentially you (as the Google Calendar user, for example) have the authenticate your application with Google, which requires a few page redirects and token exchanges. At the end of the day you end up with a token that you use in all subsequent interactions (see the fetchToken() above). There's plenty of documentation (and test coverage) to get you going, and as the code is open source you can go and scrabble around for yourself too. Here are all the bits: This opens the door to a lot of opportunities, so get coding! Update 2008-June-24: See Ryan's post on this over on the Google Data API Blog.

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Announcement of Google Data APIs on Force.com

by Jon Mountjoy on June 23, 2008 at 09:00 AM

The Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs has just been announced here at Tour de Force Santa Clara. The goal of the toolkit is to make Google App services, starting with Spreadsheets, Documents and Calendar, first class citizens of the Force.com environment. I got my hands on the toolkit yesterday and wrote a little integration app. Essentially I created events on my Google Calendar from within my Force.com app, and listed those events too. Here's what the code looked like to list events: 
CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
GoogleData.Calendar cal = service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
GoogleData feed = service.getFeed( cal.alternate );
for( xmldom.element e: feed.entries) 
 titles.add(new MyEvent(e.getValue('title'), e.getValue('content')));
As you can see, it takes about 5 lines of code to connect to a calendar and iterate through the events. Creating an event is similarly straightforward: 
 CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
 service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
 GoogleData.Calendar cal = 
     service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
 Event ee = new Event(
   subject = 'Cool new Event',
   description = 'Clouds in the sky',
   ActivityDateTime = system.now(),
   DurationInMinutes = 120
 );
service.insertEvent(cal, ee);
The only part that requires brain cycles in getting any of this to work was the authentication structure, which is part of the Google Data API architecture. Essentially you (as the Google Calendar user, for example) have the authenticate your application with Google, which requires a few page redirects and token exchanges. At the end of the day you end up with a token that you use in all subsequent interactions (see the fetchToken() above). There's plenty of documentation (and test coverage) to get you going, and as the code is open source you can go and scrabble around for yourself too. Here are all the bits: This opens the door to a lot of opportunities, so get coding! Update 2008-June-24: See Ryan's post on this over on the Google Data API Blog.

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Announcement of Google Data APIs on Force.com

by Jon Mountjoy on June 23, 2008 at 09:00 AM

The Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs has just been announced here at Tour de Force Santa Clara. The goal of the toolkit is to make Google App services, starting with Spreadsheets, Documents and Calendar, first class citizens of the Force.com environment. I got my hands on the toolkit yesterday and wrote a little integration app. Essentially I created events on my Google Calendar from within my Force.com app, and listed those events too. Here's what the code looked like to list events: 
CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
GoogleData.Calendar cal = service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
GoogleData feed = service.getFeed( cal.alternate );
for( xmldom.element e: feed.entries) 
 titles.add(new MyEvent(e.getValue('title'), e.getValue('content')));
As you can see, it takes about 5 lines of code to connect to a calendar and iterate through the events. Creating an event is similarly straightforward: 
 CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
 service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
 GoogleData.Calendar cal = 
     service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
 Event ee = new Event(
   subject = 'Cool new Event',
   description = 'Clouds in the sky',
   ActivityDateTime = system.now(),
   DurationInMinutes = 120
 );
service.insertEvent(cal, ee);
The only part that requires brain cycles in getting any of this to work was the authentication structure, which is part of the Google Data API architecture. Essentially you (as the Google Calendar user, for example) have the authenticate your application with Google, which requires a few page redirects and token exchanges. At the end of the day you end up with a token that you use in all subsequent interactions (see the fetchToken() above). There's plenty of documentation (and test coverage) to get you going, and as the code is open source you can go and scrabble around for yourself too. Here are all the bits: This opens the door to a lot of opportunities, so get coding! Update 2008-June-24: See Ryan's post on this over on the Google Data API Blog.

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Announcement of Google Data APIs on Force.com

by Jon Mountjoy on June 23, 2008 at 09:00 AM

The Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs has just been announced here at Tour de Force Santa Clara. The goal of the toolkit is to make Google App services, starting with Spreadsheets, Documents and Calendar, first class citizens of the Force.com environment. I got my hands on the toolkit yesterday and wrote a little integration app. Essentially I created events on my Google Calendar from within my Force.com app, and listed those events too. Here's what the code looked like to list events: 
CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
GoogleData.Calendar cal = service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
GoogleData feed = service.getFeed( cal.alternate );
for( xmldom.element e: feed.entries) 
 titles.add(new MyEvent(e.getValue('title'), e.getValue('content')));
As you can see, it takes about 5 lines of code to connect to a calendar and iterate through the events. Creating an event is similarly straightforward: 
 CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
 service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
 GoogleData.Calendar cal = 
     service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
 Event ee = new Event(
   subject = 'Cool new Event',
   description = 'Clouds in the sky',
   ActivityDateTime = system.now(),
   DurationInMinutes = 120
 );
service.insertEvent(cal, ee);
The only part that requires brain cycles in getting any of this to work was the authentication structure, which is part of the Google Data API architecture. Essentially you (as the Google Calendar user, for example) have the authenticate your application with Google, which requires a few page redirects and token exchanges. At the end of the day you end up with a token that you use in all subsequent interactions (see the fetchToken() above). There's plenty of documentation (and test coverage) to get you going, and as the code is open source you can go and scrabble around for yourself too. Here are all the bits: This opens the door to a lot of opportunities, so get coding! Update 2008-June-24: See Ryan's post on this over on the Google Data API Blog.

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Announcement of Google Data APIs on Force.com

by Jon Mountjoy on June 23, 2008 at 09:00 AM

The Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs has just been announced here at Tour de Force Santa Clara. The goal of the toolkit is to make Google App services, starting with Spreadsheets, Documents and Calendar, first class citizens of the Force.com environment. I got my hands on the toolkit yesterday and wrote a little integration app. Essentially I created events on my Google Calendar from within my Force.com app, and listed those events too. Here's what the code looked like to list events: 
CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
GoogleData.Calendar cal = service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
GoogleData feed = service.getFeed( cal.alternate );
for( xmldom.element e: feed.entries) 
 titles.add(new MyEvent(e.getValue('title'), e.getValue('content')));
As you can see, it takes about 5 lines of code to connect to a calendar and iterate through the events. Creating an event is similarly straightforward: 
 CalendarService service = new CalendarService();
 service.setAuthSubToken(fetchToken()); 
 GoogleData.Calendar cal = 
     service.getCalendarByTitle('TechCalendar');
 Event ee = new Event(
   subject = 'Cool new Event',
   description = 'Clouds in the sky',
   ActivityDateTime = system.now(),
   DurationInMinutes = 120
 );
service.insertEvent(cal, ee);
The only part that requires brain cycles in getting any of this to work was the authentication structure, which is part of the Google Data API architecture. Essentially you (as the Google Calendar user, for example) have the authenticate your application with Google, which requires a few page redirects and token exchanges. At the end of the day you end up with a token that you use in all subsequent interactions (see the fetchToken() above). There's plenty of documentation (and test coverage) to get you going, and as the code is open source you can go and scrabble around for yourself too. Here are all the bits: This opens the door to a lot of opportunities, so get coding! Update 2008-June-24: See Ryan's post on this over on the Google Data API Blog.

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Connecting the Clouds - Introducing the Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs

by Adam Gross on June 23, 2008 at 05:19 AM

Today at the Santa Clara Tour de Force we are releasing the Force.com Toolkit for Google Data APIs - a set of Apex libraries that makes connecting Google's Docs, Sheets, Calendar and other tools with your Force.com apps simple and straightforward.  Now the capabilities and power of Google Apps are not only available and integrated for salesforce.com users, but also developers - letting them easily create new apps that combine the two systems.

Perhaps the most significant (and technically interesting!) aspect of the toolkit is that unlike the early Web 2.0 mashups that worked primarily by combining services within the browser via JavaScript, this toolkit works by literally connecting the clouds - all of the integration and interaction happens 'in the cloud' rather than on the client.  This is possible because of the increasingly rich capabilities of the Apex runtime within Force.com - and significant because these server side interactions can be much richer and robust than anything possible on the client.  Best of all, its remarkably easy to use - just a few lines of code will have your Force.com apps exchanging data with Google Apps in real time.  This is a new model for mashups, and one we think will become increasingly common.

You can learn more about the toolkit on our website, and in person at one of our upcoming Tour de Force events.  And as always we look forward to getting your feedback, and learning about what you have built.

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Santa Clara - Tour de Force - Monday - Meet?

by Jon Mountjoy on June 19, 2008 at 10:47 AM

I'm pretty excited about attending my first Tour de Force event on Monday (23 June, Santa Clara). This is our premier event of course, and the good folks here in San Francisco have flown me across the ocean to attend the event and meet up with the community. So, please pop in and meet me if you're attending the event! There are still a few places, so feel free to register ;-) I'll be hanging around the dev zone, and perhaps participating in the Visualforce Components talk. I'll also try and provide some twitter, photo (the Flickr tag to use is tdf08 btw) and blog coverage of the event. A few weeks later I'll be at the Dublin Tour de Force, closer to home. If you're going to be there, please ping me!

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Santa Clara - Tour de Force - Monday - Meet?

by Jon Mountjoy on June 19, 2008 at 10:47 AM

I'm pretty excited about attending my first Tour de Force event on Monday (23 June, Santa Clara). This is our premier event of course, and the good folks here in San Francisco have flown me across the ocean to attend the event and meet up with the community. So, please pop in and meet me if you're attending the event! There are still a few places, so feel free to register ;-) I'll be hanging around the dev zone, and perhaps participating in the Visualforce Components talk. I'll also try and provide some twitter, photo (the Flickr tag to use is tdf08 btw) and blog coverage of the event. A few weeks later I'll be at the Dublin Tour de Force, closer to home. If you're going to be there, please ping me!

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Santa Clara - Tour de Force - Monday - Meet?

by Jon Mountjoy on June 19, 2008 at 10:47 AM

I'm pretty excited about attending my first Tour de Force event on Monday (23 June, Santa Clara). This is our premier event of course, and the good folks here in San Francisco have flown me across the ocean to attend the event and meet up with the community. So, please pop in and meet me if you're attending the event! There are still a few places, so feel free to register ;-) I'll be hanging around the dev zone, and perhaps participating in the Visualforce Components talk. I'll also try and provide some twitter, photo (the Flickr tag to use is tdf08 btw) and blog coverage of the event. A few weeks later I'll be at the Dublin Tour de Force, closer to home. If you're going to be there, please ping me!

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First months at developer.force.com

by Jon Mountjoy on June 13, 2008 at 03:26 AM

Well my first month or two here at developer.force.com has been absolutely hectic. There are a lot of people to meet, there's a lot of technology to learn, newsgroups to read, wikis to garden and so on, and I feel that I'm just at the tip of the iceberg. There is so much to do.

I've started to blog about some of the technology I'm learning here (see Emailing Visualforce Pages Rendered as PDFs that generated some great private tweet traffic!), and I've just been exposed to the release of Summer '08, and seen first hand how all of our customers were upgraded to a new platform. SaaS in action. The upgrade was almost too discreet. All of a sudden all the force.com developers have a boatload of new functionality (see the release notes on the documentation page), and it just happened.

For the next two weeks I'm off to San Francisco/Santa Clara to attend, among other things, the Tour de Force event there. After that, I'm flying back to Edinburgh for a week, and then I'm off to Dublin in Ireland, for the following Tour de Force event. If you're going to be at any of these events, please connect with me. I'll most likely be in the Dev Zone!

I'll leave you with this Tour de Force advert I came across on YouTube. You know, I still don't have one of those "no software" badges...


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Next Stops on the Tour: Santa Clara, Dublin, and Tokyo

by PK on May 27, 2008 at 04:51 PM

Image

Mark your calendar!  We are pleased to announce the next three cities for Tour de Force: Santa Clara, CA on June 23, Dublin, Ireland on June 30, and Tokyo, Japan on July 3.  Registration is officially open for Santa Clara, and we’ll open registration for Dublin and Tokyo after we nail down a few final details in the next few days.   

This also marks the launch of the official Tour de Force microsite, which -– in addition to all the registration information and venue, speaker, and agenda details -- includes the Tour blog, community Flickr feed, and a few of the hands-on tutorials that are at the heart of the Immersion Lab experience.  Bookmark the site so you can stay up-to-date on the latest Tour de Force news and announcements, and watch as we grow the site with more content and features.

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Tour de... eBay Developers Conference!

by Adam Gross on May 13, 2008 at 02:43 PM

We have always been big fans of eBay, and especially the work they have been doing with their platform - so we were delighted to be invited to keynote and present at the eBay Developers Conference June 16-18th in Chicago. There has been a lot of great work between our communities already, including Infopia's e-commerce app and the Skype mashup - but when you add in the new integration features of Apex and Visualforce, along with a host of APIs from Skype, Paypal and other eBay services you can quickly imagine some pretty interesting new apps.  Join us there to learn the technical details of how to bring Force.com and eBay together (and show us what you've built since our Chicago Tour de Force last month!)

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The Dev Zone Meets the Masala Zone

by Mark Trang on May 4, 2008 at 10:48 PM

After crossing the pond this past weekend, most of the Force.com team is now in London this week for the Dreamforce Europe 2008 conference. So apparently chicken tikka masala is the UK's most popular restaurant dish as opposed to my personal British pub favorite, fish and chips - as a result, our first meal in town was at Masala Zone in Covent Garden where many of us met the newest member of our team, Jon Mountjoy, former editor-in-chief of BEA's Dev2Dev online community. Unlike the rest of us Yanks, Jon lives in Edinburgh and will be able to provide better coverage for our EMEA community.

Img_1438 The Force.com evangelism team will be meeting with many developers at the Dreamforce event and also doing one-on-one meetings throughout the week with customers and partners in London. Drop us a line and let us know if you're in town for Dreamforce and we'd be happy to make time this week to help you build your next great app! If not, stay tuned for the latest technical announcements coming out of Dreamforce - we're excited by all the platform features that Force.com developers will soon be able to get their hands in the Spring '08 production release and upcoming Summer '08 feature preview!

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Updating a Classic

by Ron Hess on April 30, 2008 at 10:17 PM

With all the excitement around Tour de Force, and the upcoming trip to London for Dreamforce Europe, I  wanted make sure you didn't miss a cool update to a classic AppExchange app called PrintAnything.  A while back I wrote a blog post that covered how to integrate PrintAnything with Google Docs to generate PDF output.   Now, with the updated version of PrintAnything called Astitch Document Generator, you can perform this directly using the service provided by Astitch.net.

There are two things I like about this app, first off it's free and secondly it's a technically deep product, lots of customizations are possible once you learn how to utilize XSLT templates and construct the required SOQL queries.  Not a task for everyone, but if XSLT is exciting or even something you would like to learn, check out this app!

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The Tour de Force strikes again in Boston!

by Kavindra Patel on April 24, 2008 at 10:15 AM

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.

Img00114_3 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.

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TdF NYC: Force.com Hits the Big Apple

by PK on April 16, 2008 at 04:41 AM

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.

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Windy City, are you ready?

by Mark Trang on April 9, 2008 at 10:02 PM

Img_1408_smallThe 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!

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Tour de Force Atlanta DevZone Lab is Ready for Your use

by Kavindra Patel on April 7, 2008 at 09:31 PM

Devzonebanner 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.

Nickdevzone_2 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

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Anticipating Atlanta

by PK on April 4, 2008 at 06:32 PM

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.

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See Nick Carr, On de Tour

by Adam Gross on March 31, 2008 at 08:50 PM

Bigswitchcover2thumb I'm delighted to announce that Nick Carr will be joining us for most of the first leg of the Tour de Force (sorry Chicago!).  So if you are signed up for Atlanta, New York, Boston or London, as part of the keynote you'll be able hear from Nick on the transition from software to utility computing - a theme at the center of his new book, The Big Switch.

A hundred years ago, companies stopped generating their own power with steam   engines and dynamos and plugged into the newly built electric grid. The cheap power pumped out by electric utilities didn’t just change how businesses operate. It set off a chain reaction of economic and social transformations that brought the modern world into existence. Today, a similar revolution is under way. Hooked up to the Internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants have begun pumping data and software code into our homes and businesses. This time, it’s computing that’s turning into a utility.

Admission to Nick's keynote, and the rest of Tour de Force, is free in U.S. (and included in Dreamforce admission for London), but space is limited to be sure to sign up today to secure your seat.

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