Jesse Lorenz

Salesforce Spring '10 - New User Interface Theme

2010-01-05T21:07:00.000-08:00

Read about the new hotness over on the Force.com blog: Salesforce Spring '10 - New User Interface Theme

S-Control Deprecation

2009-12-28T19:38:00.000-08:00

S-Controls were labeled as deprecated in the Spring ‘09 release. With the upcoming Spring ‘10 release, we will be taking the next step in S-Control deprecation. Read the S-Control Deprecation article for more detail on what will and what won't change with the next phase of S-Control deprecation.

Dreamforce 2009: How to Write Good Unit Tests in Force.com Code

2009-11-27T11:19:00.000-08:00

In addition to presenting the Creating Rich User Experiences session at Dreamforce 2009, I also presented a session on How to Write Good Unit Tests. I was really happy with how the session turned out - after the session, a couple of attendees told me that they were surprised that I was so enthusiastic about a topic that they had considered to be complete drudgery. They said that they were excited to go back home and start applying the tips that I had provided.

If you haven't already, I encourage you to check out the video, read the accompanying How to Write Good Unit Tests article, download the slide deck and play around with the sample source code from the session.

Dreamforce 2009: Creating Rich User Experiences Using Google Visualizations and Adobe Flex

2009-11-27T11:07:00.000-08:00

The content from the session that I presented with Nick Simha at Dreamforce 2009 is now available. The feedback that we received on the session was pretty great, so I hope that you'll check it out!

In addition to the video and slide deck, be sure to check out all of the great session resources that we put together.

Union Station Photo Included in Denver Schmap

2009-11-21T11:54:00.000-08:00

Until a couple of weeks ago, I had never heard of Schmap.com, but they recently decided to include my photo of Denver's Union Station in their Schmap Guide for Denver. Ever since this decision, I have been a big fan of their Schmaps - I especially like their iPhone Schmaps.

Introduction to Developing Commercial Applications on Force.com

2009-11-04T18:31:00.000-08:00

If you're thinking about building a new application on Force.com, be sure to check out the new How to Develop Commerical Applications on Force.com blog post.

Force.com as Google Visualization Data Source

2009-09-22T18:22:00.000-07:00

From the Force.com Blog:

Did you know that you can configure Force.com apps to act as a Google Visualization Data Source? This means that you can now publish data from your Force.com org to the internet where it can be easily consumed by various Google Gadgets and Google Visualizations - not just on your website, but on any website that supports embedding the gadgets or visualizations.

Much of your company's data probably should not be published out on the internet, but you can certainly imagine a number of situations where exposing some of your company's data could be very beneficial.

For example, if your company is putting on a user conference, your marketing team might want to expose some of the attendees' demographic data so that the conference attendees can create heat maps of shared geographic locations, shared topics of interest, etc.

Or your sales team might want to expose a list of its most popular products so that your customers can see what other customers are buying - similar to the way that Amazon publishes lists of its bestselling items.

Or your support team might want to expose its call volume data so that customers know when they're most likely to be able to speak with an agent directly.

There are many additional reasons why you might want to publish some of your company's Force.com data to the internet. Once you do, your customers may just innovate and come up with additional uses for your data that you had never even thought about. Learn more about exposing your Force.com data as a Google Visualization Data Source.

Watch Force.com Developer Courses on iTunes!

2009-08-25T10:27:00.000-07:00

Really exciting news on the Force.com blog - You can now access over 30 hours of Force.com classroom training as podcasts on iTunes!

Google Visualizations Project Update

2009-08-18T18:25:00.000-07:00

Over on the Force.com blog, I mentioned that the Google Visualizations project has been updated on Force.com Code Share.

The updates include a couple of new visualization components, including a Hierarchical Chart component that can be used to visualize Account hierarchies and Contact hierarchies out of the box. In addition, the test coverage for the entire project has been increased, and there are many new code samples - so there's something for everyone!

Optimizing Standard Detail Pages That Contain Visualforce Pages

2009-08-10T11:17:00.000-07:00

I just posted a new tip on Optimizing Standard Detail Pages That Contain Visualforce Pages over on the Force.com blog. Check it out, and let me know if you have any questions.

How to Write Good Unit Tests

2009-07-30T15:02:00.000-07:00

From the blog:

If you’ve written Apex Code and deployed it to production, then you’ve encountered the 75% code coverage requirement. In order to help you achieve (and hopefully exceed) 75% code coverage, I’ve written an article that introduces some of the most important concepts for crafting good unit tests. It explores the proper structure of unit tests, the code scenarios that your unit tests should cover, and the properties of well-written unit tests.

One property of well-written unit tests is that they are thorough. Good unit tests exercise your code in expected conditions, and in unexpected conditions. One unexpected condition that you may have encountered, is when your code deliberately throws an exception because something out of the ordinary has happened. It’s not necessarily obvious how to write a unit test for this scenario, which is why my article demonstrates this useful pattern:

static testMethod void verifySpecificExceptionIsThrown() {
/* Set up all conditions for testing here. */

try{
/* Call the method being tested here. */
}
catch (SpecificException e){
// If the expected SpecificException is thrown and caught,
// then the test was successful and we can exit.
return;
}

// If the expected SpecificException is not thrown and caught,
// then fail the test.
System.assert(false, 'A SpecificException was expected, but was not thrown.');
}

To learn more, and to see this particular pattern in action, read How to Write Good Unit Tests.

Google I/O: Force.com as a Google Visualization Data Source

2009-06-27T08:26:00.000-07:00

The video from the Google I/O session where I spoke about Force.com as a Google Visualization Data Source is up on YouTube. It's been viewed a number of times already - I'm glad that so many people are interested in Google Visualizations and Force.com! The discussion specific to Force.com starts at about 32:00.

You can also download the accompanying slide deck from the Implementing your Own Visualization Datasource session page.

Google Code Blog - Guest Post

2009-05-27T18:30:00.000-07:00

Google just published a guest blog post that hints at the exciting announcement that we'll be revealing during our upcoming Google I/O session:

...

Salesforce.com will be co-presenting a session at Google I/O that will discuss how to embed the power of the Google Visualization API in Force.com business applications, and how to turn a Force.com application in to a Google Visualization data source. We hope to see you there!

...

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/05/visualizing-your-clouds-data.html

Speaking @ Google I/O

2009-05-18T18:12:00.000-07:00

I'm really excited to be speaking at the upcoming Google I/O conference! Here's my speaker blurb:

Jesse Lorenz is a Technical Evangelist at Salesforce.com, focused on inspiring independent software vendors, product teams and other partners to architect and build innovative applications on Force.com. Jesse is one of the authors of the Google Visualization Component Library for Force.com.

http://code.google.com/events/io/speakers.html#jlorenz

Nir Bar-Lev, Itai Raz, and I will be discussing the Google Visualization API.

Are You Having Problems Sharing?

2009-05-14T18:56:00.000-07:00

From the blog:

The number one rule in life for author Robert Fulghum is to "Share everything." Your Force.com application is one place where it’s okay to break that rule and not share everything. That’s why Force.com allows developers and administrators to control access to data at many different levels. You can control access at the object-level, the record-level and even at the field-level. In the vast majority of cases, the appropriate Force.com sharing settings can be defined declaratively by simply pointing and clicking. In some cases, developers may need the ability to define even more sophisticated sharing settings, and this is where Apex Managed Sharing comes in.
Apex Managed Sharing allows you to use Apex Code to build sophisticated and dynamic sharing settings that aren’t otherwise possible. For example, a developer can use Apex Managed Sharing to write a trigger that will automatically share a custom object record with a user that has been specified in a lookup field. You can also use Apex Managed Sharing to write custom Visualforce controllers that implement your sharing logic.
After an introduction to sharing, the accompanying article looks at the components of Apex Managed Sharing, and how you can use Apex Managed Sharing in your own applications. The article, Using Apex Managed Sharing to Create Custom Record Sharing Logic, also provides sample code for the trigger described above.

Apex Managed Sharing is a really interesting aspect of Force.com. It enables developers to build some very innovative applications.

The Fastest Path to SaaS: Force.com Technical Overview for ISVs

2009-05-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

From the blog:

CTOs, Architects, VPs of R&D, Product Managers, Developers and other Technologists at companies that want to build and sell SaaS applications should attend this Monday's "Fastest Path to SaaS" webinar. During this webinar, we will examine the obstacles to success that companies traditionally encounter when they try to build and deliver applications in the cloud. We'll take a look at the Force.com platform and explain why Force.com solves these problems. (Hint: Force.com is the fastest, most trusted and most complete platform for building and delivering applications in the cloud.) We will also discuss a few examples of the many companies that have already achieved success by building their applications on Force.com. Register now to learn more about why Force.com is the Fastest Path to SaaS.

If you're a technologist at an ISV that wants to deliver SaaS applications, be sure to check it out. I'm interested to know what you think of it. Are there any topics that we should add, or cover in more depth? Is there anything we should remove? Did the webinar convince you that building and delivering apps on Force.com lets you focus on innovation and not infrastructure?

Phoenix User Group Meeting 4/23

2009-04-24T17:30:00.000-07:00

Big thanks to David Gildar for leading the Phoenix Salesforce.com User Group meeting last night. It was great to meet a bunch of local users.

I enjoyed iLinc's demonstration of how their web conferencing software integrates with salesforce. And Dan England gave a great demo of Informatica On Demand. If you're using the dataloader to get data in to or out of salesforce.com, you should definitely check out Informatica On Demand. It was the #1 Data Integration Service for salesforce.com last year and it's free!

I'm already looking forward to the next User Group meeting. If you're local to Phoenix, I hope to see you there!

Force.com IDE 15.0.2 Now Available

2009-04-24T12:22:00.000-07:00

From the blog:

"You'll want to install the latest version of the Force.com IDE. This maintenance release for Spring '09 includes several fixes and is highly recommended. For more information, check out the release notes."

http://blog.sforce.com/sforce/2009/04/forcecom-ide-1502-now-available.html

The Deploy Applications to Production Faster wiki article was updated in the process as well.

How to Build an App on Force.com

2009-04-14T08:14:00.000-07:00

If you're curious about what it's like to build an app on Force.com, I recommend watching the video from the Force.com in Action - Fast Application Development in the Cloud session that was presented at Cloudforce London. It's an outstanding introduction to many of the services that Force.com provides to business analysts and developers for free.

If you're inspired by the session and want to get your hands dirty, the exercises in the Force.com developer workbook are a great way to get started building apps on Force.com.

The other session videos from Cloudforce London can be found here: http://www.salesforce.com/eu/cloudforce/09-london/recorded-sessions.jsp

Sorting Out the Truth.

2009-03-13T18:00:00.000-07:00

As you can see from above, Hertz doesn't take in to account the time unit of measure when sorting rental cars by price. After seeing this, I started searching the internet for "units of measure jokes" and ended up discovering this awesome SI prefix joke:

0.001 on = 1 million

I should probably just buy the 10 Kinds of People t-shirt already...

"Zero" Creates Brilliant New Business Models

2009-03-05T18:49:00.000-08:00

If you understand where the zero fits into the business model, then there are plenty of business models that work great.
...
It makes plenty of economic sense for certain things to be free and then the scarce goods are what you charge for. The trick is enabling a business model where the infinite goods make the scarce goods you control more valuable. This is absolutely possible for any business -- and, in fact, failing to understand how you do this will most likely doom your overall business.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20090304/0051483982.shtml

One simple example of this is to use that item that "costs" zero as a promotional good for something that does not have a zero marginal cost.

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20061025/014811.shtml

The band No Doubt, is giving away their entire catalog of music as a download, for folks who buy certain concert tickets.

http://techdirt.com/articles/20090304/1644373993.shtml

SaaS vs. On-Premise: What Did You Do This Weekend?

2009-02-12T07:42:00.000-08:00

Here's a tweet from salesforce.com customer Jeff Grosse:

I'm glad that Salesforce.com is performing an upgrade to my CRM system tonight so I don't have to.

Compare that with Dan Blake's description of upgrading Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0:

We’ll be installing the update to the update in the CourseMax data center this weekend. It’s a pretty involved process. Here is the process we’ll go through:

Apply the update in the sandbox
Since our CRM server roles are split up, we’ll have to install it four times

Run through the test plan on all four servers
Apply the update on the production servers
Six different servers this time

Run through the test plan again on Production
... This is also why I’m not really comfortable yet with the 2 month update cycle. I like to keep current with updates but it is a lot of work. Keep in mind that this is in addition to the testing and updating we do for our own software. If we would have installed the first version of Update Rollup 2 we would have had to go through this whole process twice within a month [emphasis added].

This might be the most compelling argument for SaaS I've heard - you get to keep your weekends!

He's the DJ, I'm the Wrapper Class

2009-02-02T19:00:00.000-08:00

A common request on the Visualforce developer board is to be able to display a selection check box next to every record in a table. Check out these two posts on the developer.force.com wiki for details on how to use a "wrapper class" to accomplish this requirement.

http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Checkbox_in_DataTable
http://wiki.apexdevnet.com/index.php/Wrapper_Class

Also, be sure to check out this classic:

Cloud Connect Recap

2009-01-28T10:43:00.000-08:00

In case you weren't able to attend Cloud Connect in person, Ryan Marples put together a great recap video from Cloud Connect.

Cloud Connect

2009-01-18T12:33:00.000-08:00

I'm going to be at the Cloud Connect Event Tuesday - Thursday of this week. Drop by the Force.com booth and say hello if you're there as well.