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.

As I was talking to folks at the early evening reception in the DevZone, many of them were telling me they had realized the power of the Force.com platform and ideas were sparking in their minds, from building new business solutions for their company to building their own software-as-a-service businesses by developing Force.com apps to sell.

If you were not able to take advantage of the educational experience as part of the 1st leg of the Tour de Force, watch for the next set of Tour de Force events coming to a city near you.

Meanwhile, you can go to "Getting Started" on the Force.com Developer Community site.