Salesforce.com Winter 11 Release Is Coming Soon

On October 11th, Salesforce.com will begin rolling out its Winter 11 release. Included in the release are many new developer features that will no doubt assist in creating rich applications and websites on the Force.com platform. The new features cover almost all aspects of development on the force.com platform, from packaging and deployment, to Sites, to governor limit increases.

I think some of the most exciting enhancements are the increases in the governor limits. The total request time for a callout and maximum size for a callout limit have been removed altogether. They have also increased the general heap size from 2 MB to 3 MB and raised the character limits of classes and triggers from 100,000 and 32,000 characters, respectively, to one million characters. The maximum amount of code in an organization has been raised from 1 MB to 2 MB, and the total number of ChildRelationship, RecordTypeInfo and PicklistEntry objects, as well as field calls have been raised from 10 to 100. Anytime they raise the governor limit restrictions is a good thing in my mind because they are one of the most challenging aspects of developing on the Force.com platform.

Some other exciting additions are the new System Log Console and the View State Inspector for Visualforce Pages. The new System Log Console allows you to get a better view of what your code is doing as well as making it easier to filter and find execution statistics like how close you are to your governor limits. The View State Inspector allows the developer to easily see the data values and information being held in the view state of Visualforce pages, and thus makes debugging much easier.

They’ve also made it easier to optimize your URL’s for SEO and user accessibility by adding Sites URL redirects. They have added some security enhancements like support for OAuth 2.0 and the ability to use Salesforce.com as a Single Sign-On identity provider as well.

To read about all the features of Winter 11 and to sign up for a preview org to start experimenting with the new features, head over to the Winter 11 Release Site.