I'm
back in San Francisco again this year for Dreamforce '12. After
an (adventurous || adrenaline packed || terrifying || downright good
time) weekend of climbing in Yosemite with CRM
Science's Ami
Assayag, I came to this city in a mentally prepared state to soak in
as much as I can. The older, wiser, and more experienced me
thought I knew what to expect, but it seems #df12 has grown just as
much as I have over the past year.
The
number of attendees, venues, and sessions have all expanded.
Somehow, I managed to spend all of my day in the Moscone West
building.
Session
#1: Unleash the Force.com User Interface with Skuid
Skoodat's Skuid
seems like a great tool that would save a ton of time in developing
custom page layouts or even stand-alone pages. Its drag and drop
visual page editor reminded me of Frontpage or Dreamweaver as the
code for the page is created for you behind the scenes. Within a few
minutes, the presenters created a new multi-paned and tabbed Contact
view as well as a custom list page. With a handful of clicks, they
were able to add additional actions to each row of their data set.
I'd love to see something like this become a general release feature
Session
#2: The 10-Year Evolution of Developers and Salesforce.com
This
was another session that took place in the Developer Theater tucked behind the Dev Zone. David Claiborne of The Claiborne Company did a great job of showing how far Salesforce.com has come along over the last decade+. Apex and
Visualforce haven't always been key components to the platform,
neither have sandboxes or custom objects. This session made me
realize that I began working with many of the modern enhancements of
Salesforce.com as they were being released.
For a
list of those features and to vote for your 3 favorite features visit: here
Session
#3: Apex Design Patterns
Not
coming from a developer background, this was one of the best sessions
of the day for me. Not only were best practices discussed, but
common development patterns applied to Apex were demonstrated. I can
see future posts in my near future as I explore the 6 patterns
presented.
- Singleton
- Strategy
- sObject Decorater
- Façade
- Composite
- Bulk State Transition
My other sessions of the day included:
Session #4: JavaScript Patterns and Practices from the Salesforce Experts
Session #5: Introduction to Heroku
Session #6: Workbench: The API Swiss Army Knife
The Expo (Moscone North) and Campground (between North and south) opened today at 2 and held a Welcoming Reception at 6. Great food and drinks spread out among the vendors.
Follow me on Twitter: @kirkevonphilly
Join the PhillyForce Salesforce.com User Group: http://philly.force.com/
