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Generally Available Features for Force.com Developers in Summer ’12

By Josh Birk | Published: May 10, 2012

One of the great things about Salesforce.com’s annual three release schedule is that it allows for piloting and previewing new features before they get rolled out to the general audience.  This allows us to test things out more thoroughly while developers and admins are kicking the tires of the features themselves.  Summer ’12 has some great features going generally available, and here’s your quick list to them:

Single View State

One of my personal favorites from Spring ’12, Single View State will compress multiple form bindings down to a single viewstate with Visualforce instead of creating different ones.  If you… Continue reading

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Get Ready for Summer ’12

By Josh Birk | Published: May 4, 2012

 

It’s sunny and warm even here in windy Chicago – which can only mean one thing: our Summer ’12 release is ramping up and you’ll want to make sure you’re prepared for all the changes coming down the pipe.  We’ve got features from Spring going generally available, updates to our API’s, changes to JavaScript Remoting, new features for the Developer Console, added functionality for Schema Builder and some great new tricks in store for SOQL and Apex.  What should you do to make sure you’re all set?  Here’s a breakdown:

1. Read the release notes… Continue reading

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Using Passport for OAuth with Force.com

By Josh Birk | Published: April 3, 2012

Passport is a great Node.js middleware module for handling OAuth strategies with Express or Connect based applications. It maintains a basic concept of building out strategies which makes it easy for providers to add new strategies, as well as a small footprint of code for developers to utilize the strategy.  One of the great things about interacting with the Force.com platform is that by leveraging open technologies like OAuth2 and REST – you can choose the tools that you like to get the job done.

While tinkering with Passport, my only real problem was that there wasn’t a handy… Continue reading

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Adding an iOS Detail View with the Mobile SDK

By Josh Birk | Published: March 30, 2012

One of the things I’ve illustrated with the iOS project of our Mobile SDK is the ease at which a developer can get up and running with the project template that comes with the SDK.  Out of the gate, the SDK demonstrates logging a user in with OAuth and accessing a list of results from a SOQL query to display within a standard table list view.  While this is a great boilerplate, especially showing a clear example of using OAuth for login (which if you are still, say, using a SOAP endpoint – you should be looking at OAuth as… Continue reading

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How to Be Ready for Cloudstock

By Josh Birk | Published: March 14, 2012

Cloudstock is almost upon us, the doors of Moscone are due to crack open at 7:30AM Thursday morning for this day long, completely free, content packed event. Are you prepared? Check these items off your list to make sure:

1. Register

You’ll need this one just to get into the door: if you haven’t registered – register now.  It’s not too late (at least, not at the time of this writing), but you can’t get a badge unless you register.  And yes, you do need your badges.

2. Plan your agenda ahead of time

This day is going to go… Continue reading

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Mobile SDK 1.1: Flexible OAuth and iOS Blocks

By Josh Birk | Published: March 14, 2012

As Sandeep just recently noted, the Mobile SDK has been updated just in time for Cloudstock with great new features like offline support for hybrid applications.  Mr. Bhanot goes into great detail on the offline component, but that’s not all that has been included in the 1.1 version of the SDK for mobile developers.

Flexible OAuth

By popular demand, the SDK also now gives the ability for hybrid applications to have more direct control over the authentication flow.  Previously, the OAuth process would be initiated whenever the application was first loaded, but now you can update specific variables in bootconfig.js… Continue reading

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Cloudstock: Learn How to Go from Admin to Wizard

By Josh Birk | Published: March 9, 2012

Last week I got the chance to drive up to Milwaukee, courtesy of the Wisconsin User Group and organized by Andy Ogenoff and Julia Napolitano. I was there to talk about using jQuery with Visualforce (which I will cover in an upcoming post), but before I was up – there was Brian Kwong talking about adopting developer skills to help out his daily role as a Salesforce administrator. When I asked Brian, known now internally at his company as a “Salesforce Wizard” (and has the hat to prove it), to give me a couple sentences on the impact of this… Continue reading

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Meet Up in Milwaukee, March 1st

By Josh Birk | Published: February 24, 2012

As much as I enjoy sneaking off to sunny San Francisco to do the occasional webinar or developer convention – I also love hanging out with the local Midwestern community. I’ll be up in Milwaukee on March 1st to show some use cases of integrating jQuery with Force.com, and I’ll be followed by Salesforce wizard Brian Kwong demonstrating his journey from administrator to developer.

If you’re interested in getting a preview of some of the jQuery content, you can check out the jQuery session from Dreamforce 2011, or more specifically I’ll showing examples of using both jqPlot charting and… Continue reading

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More Info On the Crypto Class

By Josh Birk | Published: February 24, 2012

We’ve got a new article up over on the Wiki which should help Apex developers understand the capabilities of the sometimes cryptic Crypto class. Actually, the Crypto class isn’t all that cryptic, but there are some plays on words which I simply can’t pass up.

Using the Apex Crypto Class will walk developers through the basics of the class, the kinds of encryptions and decryption one can use and some sample code demonstrating a couple of use cases – including how to sign with your own private key. Head on over for some fine cryptographic knowledge… Continue reading

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Unit Test Scoping in Spring ’12

By Josh Birk | Published: February 22, 2012

There are several pitfalls that developers can fall into when writing unit tests, and traditionally speaking one of the easiest to fall into can be coding with a reliance on existing data.  So for instance, you want to to prove that your SOQL is correctly getting data from your custom object – this unit test might seem relatively innocent:
List<Furniture__c> dressers = [SELECT ID, Name, Type__c from Furniture__c where Type__c =: dresserFilter LIMIT 10];
System.assertNotEquals(dressers.size(),0);

Which works great in the sandbox where you’ve been developing your custom furniture application with test data, but might instantly break when you move… Continue reading

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