Though it may not feel that way in much of the US right now (including my hometown of San Francisco!), spring is in the air. The Spring 11 release that is. The next release of Salesforce.com (aka Spring 11) is scheduled to roll out in late January and February (check http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ for the exact schedule) and I'll be co-hosting a preview Webinar on January 18th (6am PST and repeated again at 10am PST) to discuss some of the cool platform features that will be included in the upcoming release. Quinton already posted everything you need to know about the webinar and so I thought I'd just highlight some of the features that we'll be discussing and demoing during the webinar.

1) Revised Apex Governor limits:  A topic near and dear to all Force.com developers. The governor limits have been simplified in Spring 11 and we'll be discussing some of the key changes during the webinar. Among other changes, the Trigger context for governor limits has been eliminated in Spring 11. There is now just one context and a single set of governor limits for all Apex code – whether its written in a trigger, a VF controller, a test class or a web service.

2) Chatter triggers: Come hear about the new Apex triggers that you can write on the FeedItem and FeedComment objects.

3) Field Sets and dynamic Visualforce : Letting Administrators pick and choose which fields to display on a Visualforce page via config (no code changes required). Being able to determine which fields should be displayed on a page at runtime. If that sounds remotely interesting, come find out more during the webinar. ISV developers should be especially excited about the new Field Sets feature.

4) Visual Process: Based on the sold-out sessions at Dreamforce, the Visual Process tool is hot! And rightly so. It allows you to develop complex wizard type UI to support business processes like call scripting, lead creation, insurance quotes etc. via a sophisticated drag-and-drop WYSIWYG tool. No need to write a single line of code. You can also embed a Visual Process in a Visualforce page using a simple <flow:interview> tag. This allows you to develop cool mashups and expose Visual Process flows to Sites, Customer and Partner Portals.

5) Criteria based sharing: The ability to share records based on field values (instead of record ownership). This is one of the most eagerly awaited platform features and its GA in Spring 11.

Here's hoping that my iPhone doesn't cause me to miss the 6am early start! Remember to signup for the webinar and I'll see you all next week.