We have always been big fans of eBay, and especially the work they have been doing with their platform - so we were delighted to be invited to keynote and present at the eBay Developers Conference June 16-18th in Chicago. There has been a lot of great work between our communities already, including Infopia's e-commerce app and the Skype mashup - but when you add in the new integration features of Apex and Visualforce, along with a host of APIs from Skype, Paypal and other eBay services you can quickly imagine some pretty interesting new apps.  Join us there to learn the technical details of how to bring Force.com and eBay together (and show us what you've built since our Chicago Tour de Force last month!) (May 13)

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The Tour de Force events across the globe continue to draw great attendance and interest from developers looking to build new SaaS applications. The event is yet to make its way to India but I have been traveling across  India (Pune & Bangalore) meeting with partners, educating them about Force.com and Platform as a Service generally – and the response has been tremendously positive. At one of our partners in Pune, I delivered an hour long session on PaaS and Force.com – and the result was a lot of very interesting questions and interest in this paradigm shift. A similar event in Bangalore with over 100 attendees drew a similar response.  Read more. (May 13)

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After crossing the pond this past weekend, most of the Force.com team is now in London this week for the Dreamforce Europe 2008 conference. So apparently chicken tikka masala is the UK's most popular restaurant dish as opposed to my personal British pub favorite, fish and chips - as a result, our first meal in town was at Masala Zone in Convent Garden where many of us met the newest member of our team, Jon Mountjoy, former editor-in-chief of BEA's Dev2Dev online community. Unlike the rest of us Yanks, Jon lives in Edinburgh and will be able to provide better coverage for our EMEA community.  Read more. (May 4)

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With all the excitement around Tour de Force, and the upcoming trip to London for Dreamforce Europe, I  wanted make sure you didn't miss a cool update to a classic AppExchange app called PrintAnything.  A while back I wrote a blog post that covered how to integrate PrintAnything with Google Docs to generate PDF output.   Now, with the updated version of PrintAnything called Astitch Document Generator, you can perform this directly using the service provided by Astitch.net. Read more. (April 30)

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We landed in Boston along with thousands of people from all around the world who had come to run the Boston Marathon.  But the more than 500 Force.com customers, partners and developers who joined us at the Tour de Force event had a different goal in mind: to learn how to build apps on the Force.com platform. 

Salesforce administrators and developers got really excited, not only because they were able to attend Tour de Force for free and attend sessions tailored for them, but they were able to go to the DevZone Immersion Lab, pick up the Force.com Workbook, sit at one of the Apple Macs, log into their own “free Developer Edition account” and learn about Force.com Builder, Force.com IDE, Apex Code, Visualforce and Force.com Code Share while building a simple mileage tracker app in a short time between sessions.  Read more. (April 24)

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