Salesforce Blogs, Books, Ideas, Videos and Developer Goodies

Blogs

After writing my The Most Influential Salesforce.com Tech Bloggers article, I’ve received links to some other great-looking Salesforce.com Blogs.  Check 'em out:

• Arkus Blog, authored by @JustEdelstein
• TECH GERM, authored by @abhinavguptas
• Adventures in the Cloud, authored by @amber9904
• Just Your Average Salesforce Admin, authored by @mattybme
• Technology Share, authored by @aslambari

You can follow these five bloggers, and all the other SFDC Tech Bloggers on Twitter with one click. Click the “Follow this list” button here.

Books

Jeff Douglas and Wes Nolte have teamed up to write "The Salesforce Handbook: A Newcomer’s Guide to Building Applications on Salesforce.com and the Force.com Platform".  They published a teaser excerpt on their blog: The Salesforce Handbook.  The book is not due out until October (plenty of time to get your signed copy at Dreamforce 2010!). Visit their blog to join the email subscription list.

Salesforce IdeaExchange: Ideas I Liked / Promoted

Allow Single Test Method Execution from an Apex Class (120): Give Developers / QA Testers the ability to select the specific test methods that should be tested in an Apex test class. Handy for when you are trying to debug a single method! Vote it up here.

Cool Videos

I really liked this Flash App Demo  by James Ward.  The demo shows the power of the new Flash Builder tool, and integrating it with Salesforce.com.  In the demo, James shows an app that allows him to take a picture of a person, associate it with a contact record in Salesforce, which then automatically uploads that picture into a custom image field on the Salesforce contact object.  Very cool, check it out at the The Salesforce Channel.


Developer Stuff

In the Salesforce blogosphere, there is lots of interesting stuff happening on the developer front.

Managed Package Woes:  Abhinav Gupta of Tech Germ describes a common problem that developers first encounter when migrating their Force.com web-service apps from a developer org to a managed package.  During this migration, and external Java, Flex, PHP or .NET client code that made web-service calls to the Salesforce WSDL Web Services break, because the custom sObjects and fields get unique prefixes during the packaging.  He presents two solutions, read more ...

Java Namespace Exception Errors: Abhinav follows that great article with a 2nd one, describing the cause, effect and solution for when Java namespace exception errors are thrown, when using WSC and Apache Axis WSDL2 Java together in a JVM or project.  To avoid this problem, Abhina suggests compiling the WSDLs using WSC.  Read more ...

Force.com Explorer (Beta): Salesforce Developers and Admins have a new tool for their arsenal: Force.com Explorer (Beta).  This is an AIR app, built with Adobe Flash Builder for Force.com, which allows you to “browse your database schema, custom objects, and fields, and build test SOSL queries. It can also generate a simple schema report.”  Read more at Developer Force.

VisualForce Pages that Talk to You? Aslam Bari thought of a great new trick: enable your VisualForce Pages to Speak!  He found two useful web service / plugins on the net: jTalk is a an API that converts text to speech on the fly, and DewPlayer is flash MP3 player. Combined, you can integrate these into your VisualForce pages and convert output data to speech. Read more at Technology Share. One of the barriers for new developers posting apps to the AppExchange has been the cost of getting those applications reviewed and approved by Salesforce.com. That barrier has become less impacting, with lower security review fees. Read more at Developer Force.

Posting AppExchange Apps Just Got Cheaper: One of the barriers for new developers posting apps to the AppExchange has been the cost of getting those applications reviewed and approved by Salesforce.com. That barrier has become less impacting with lower security review fees. Read more at Developer Force.