I have been heads down (or is it up in the cloud-computing world?) recently working on Chatter, collaborating with members of the Chatter Dev Zone, prepping for Cloudforce in New York City (are you going?), and working on a book about Force.com. In the midst of it all, I took some time to complete my Spring '10 re-certifications.
Over my time working for Salesforce, I have learnt to really appreciate the re-certification process: It forces you to look at the new additions in the platform, and applications. And with three releases a years, things move very quickly.
Amongst all the other nuggets in the release notes, were two gems I immediately gravitated to:
My Domains
The pilot of My Domains has me super excited. Aside from the ability to improve security against cross-site-scripting attacks, and user friendly urls, My Domains should help immensely when working with oAuth, where you need a unique URL. I'm planning on taking My Domains for a spin with my Chatter & Google Wave Mash-up. Watch out Google I/O, here i come!
Packaging Improvements
Over the past six months I have seen an increasing emphasis on improving the development life-cycle in regards to Salesforce applications. The Development Lifecycle Guide, for example should be on every Salesforce.com developer and administrators bookshelf. The focus doesn't stop there however, Spring '10 introduces both Patch Updates and Push Upgrades in Limited Release, both of which should have been introduced with a fanfare of trumpets, if you ask me. Spending a number of years in Professional Services, (can you find me in the 'Meet Our Experts' video? It is almost as much fun as playing Where's Wally - well not really; I can see my daughter tilting her head at me with that look only a seven year-old can master, and saying "What are you talking about Daddy?") and working with many AppExchange partners, these Packaging Improvements are a big deal.
In summary, if you haven't done it already, take the time to re-certify (or get certified if you are not already!) on Spring '10, and get into the habit of taking your re-certification exams as soon as you can once a new version of Salesforce is made generally available. The small investment in study time is paid back ten-fold in knowing the new tools and tricks of the latest release (for instance, did you know you can now create generic collection like Set<Sobject>foo=newSet<Sobject>(); ? I can think of a dozen apps I have written I would do different with that ability alone)