We know you want it. And we want you to have it. What’s it? Timely, educational, and helpful technical content that teaches you how to develop apps with the Force.com platform and related technologies.

This time around, we want contributions from you, the expert in our community, the you that lives and breathes Force.com every day and knows how to make things work. So we’re running five, count them, five developer content contests based on community suggested topics. And to make it worth your while to participate, we’re offering cold, hard cash to the winners. Please jump over to the… Continue reading

Here it is, folks, the post you’ve been waiting for! Before I reveal the elite few who will be joining the Force.com MVP group, let me preface the announcement by saying that this iteration was particularly tough. We got a very large number of nominations on some really great community members, and spent a lot of time doing research, gathering feedback, and considering the candidates.

As a refresher: There isn’t any formula to guarantee entry to MVP territory, but the qualities that characterize MVP-dom typically include: Technical prowess, standing in the community, leadership, and stewardship. Put another way, MVPs are people who… Continue reading

As you may know, we recently announced the GA of the Mobile SDK which lets you develop mobile applications for Force.com and Database.com. On January 26th, Eugene Oksman (PM for the Mobile SDK) and I will host a webinar that introduces the Mobile SDK and covers

• The three basic development approaches for mobile apps – native, web (HTML5), and hybrid.
• How you can develop cross-platform web mobile apps using HTML5 and Visualforce
• How you can use the SDK to develop hybrid apps - HTML5 based web apps that can access local device features such as local contacts, camera etc.

A big thank you to all participants in our Holiday Cookbook Contest!

And, thanks for your patience; we got many, many more submissions than anticipated — one of those good problems to have, I think. While it has taken us a while to sift through the recipes, it certainly has been worth the wait. Additionally, there were enough entrants that we decided to award a runner up in addition to the winner!

The overall winner for the Holiday Contest and the grand prize of a MacBook Air is the gentleman you see in the photo to the left… Continue reading

Well the rains have started here in SF. Makes me want to get cozy on the couch and read tweets all day.

Here our some of our favorite tweets of the past week from the world of Force.com. Follow @forcedotcom to keep up with these characters!

Given my background in single sign-on, the Spring ’12 feature I’m most excited about is the ability to use external ‘authentication providers’ to give access to Salesforce portals and orgs. Where the existing SAML-based SSO allows you to authenticate users within the enterprise for single sign-on into Salesforce, you will now be able to leverage third-party services such as Facebook and Janrain to log users in. One use case for this technology is allowing customers to access a portal via Facebook; another would be for small businesses, for which a SAML identity provider is out of reach, to use their… Continue reading