Things that ROCK in Salesforce Winter 11'

Force.com Labs never cease to surprise and please you during every new release. After creating a lot of buzz with their new chatter this time, they are now back with the Winter 11.

Things that ROCK in winter 11'

1. System Log console

If you have not seen the awesomeness yet, check out the brand new System Console. I know this feature is quite old in other languages and their sophisticated IDE's but for a force.com developer, this will be a amazing feature to debug languages.
Have only seen the screen shot, so will need to confirm what exactly it shows.
Check out this blog post for a sneak peek, which includes this amazing screenshot:

2. Visualforce Chatter Components:
The power of Force.com comes with simple tools for complex business processes. The Chatter components for Visualforce will help embed chatter feed into the Visualforce page. With simple tags like.
<Chatter: FeedWithFollowers entityId={!RecordId}/>

3. Language Translation for Force.com
This feature would be really interesting, while developing custom apps for Multi-lingual support. By default as announced, Serbian, Slovak, Georgian and a number of English variants are supported.

4. #Hashtagging is enabled in Chatter
How many of us simply love the Twitter #HashTag? Now the #Hashtagging is supported in Chatter, we can actually predict the trends like Twitter into chatter.
Looking at the chatter updates, you can feel that the corporate wall is slowly getting thinner and thinner and people are liking the new medium of communication and collaboration.

5. OAuth 2.0 Support
Usefull for authorizing external websites with Salesforce. To know more click here.


6. Visualforce View State Inspector
In a separate tab of the Visual Page editor, you can now see the view state of the page running. You can use this to fine tune the visualforce page and no need for debugging. Not good if you are using Eclipse IDE for development.

7. Global Search
Searching on Content can help reduce a lot of time hunting for the record you forgot.

Global Search gives you instant results and suggests terms using auto-complete for records that you’ve recently viewed, edited, or looked up. You can drill down to specific items, including articles, content, products, solutions, Chatter feeds, files, groups, and people.

8. Set up UI update
Finally the setup sheds its old skin and jumps up in the cloud. No actually use here, but I kinda love the new skin, its clean.

9. Default Values in Visualforce Input Fields
A little more help in the Input Field fields. Also, the recordtype also affects the inputfield properties.


10. Revised Governor Limits
I was pretty excited on seeing this enhancement, but the excitement died down when no changes in the DML limits was seen.


For Winter '11. tests no longer have specific limits. Instead, they've been included with triggers, anonymous blocks, Visualforce controllers, and WSDL methods.

Good news is many of the Limits are now reduced.

Some of the limits affected from the change:

Removed limits:
• Total request time for one callout (HTTP request or Web services call) has been removed.
• Maximum size for a callout (HTTP request or Web services call) has been removed.
Increases to existing limits:
• General heap size has been raised from 2 MB to 3 MB, with no scaling. In addition, batch Apex heap size is 6 MB.
• Apex classes and triggers have been raised from 100,000 characters and 32,000 characters, respectively, and can now be 1 million characters long, not counting comments, test methods, and classes defined with @isTest.
• Maximum amount of Apex code allowed in an organization has been raised from 1 MB to 2 MB.
• Total number of ChildRelationship, RecordTypeInfo and PicklistEntry objects allowed and total number of fields calls allowed has been raised from 10 to 100.

Thats all in it from me today, you can check the full features of the release on Salesforce.
The release notes are available here.