Force.com is the next Visual Basic

Some very interesting musings by Dan Appleman.  I agree with his conclusion to a large extent.  I may not be as old and wise as Dan, but I had my share of dealings with Visual Basic.  Force.com is the most successful embodiment of the spirit "get things done" in the enterprise application arena since Visual Basic.  So many people forget a lot of the times that spirit is more important than anything else.  Of course you strive to do things right and elegantly, but many times you just need to get things done.  How many ventures survive more than one year? Five years? Ten years? 100 years?  It's pretty close to being ridiculous to fret over if you can use a tool to build something that can last for years, when the stuff you're building FOR lasts nowhere near that long.  When VB got laughed at, countless empowered people already started to get things done with it, right then and there.  Eventually the doubters are forgotten.

The exact same thing is now happening with the force.com platform and its community.

Question log from "Advanced Testing & Debugging Using the Developer Console"

The Webinar is based on the upcoming Summer '13 release.  Again I've removed less than interesting questions from the log I saved.

Question log from the "Inside the Force.com Query Optimizer" webinar

The webinar will prob. be available on the Developerforce site or their Youtube channel.  I saved the question chat log as there are a few items of interest, for instance, characteristics of skinny tables, which aren't listed anywhere in the public documentation.  I did delete questions that were too entry-level to save space.

Unable to insert EntitySubscription for users

This happened when doing an auto-follow logic.  I noticed the ES records cannot be inserted for any user who has logged on at least once since the Chatter feature is turned on.  The error message is:

System.DmlException: Insert failed. First exception on row 0; first error: DUPLICATE_VALUE, duplicate value found: <unknown> duplicates value on record with id: <unknown>: []

WebLink entity (capital L)

The Guide for the Force.com Migration Tool is prob. the least well maintained documentation for the platform.  I've never seen so many inaccurate items in any other documents (search "Migration" on my blog for more).  Here's one I kept forgetting to write about: the WebLink entity, which is meant for the custom links used on page layouts.  Note the capital L in the name, which in the Guide is lower case ("Weblink"). Using lowercase will give you "Entity type: 'Weblink' is unknown", as the manifest file is very much properly XML, i.e., case sensitive.

Happy debugging!