Winter 09 (156) – New And Updated Documentation

More Winter 09 documentation has been released. Scott Hemmeter wrote a post listing some of the pages containing new content, but I wanted to go a bit in-depth on those and some other parts of developer.force.com.

Documentation
This should be your first stop whenever you have any questions about ANYTHING on the Platform. It has sections on Web Services API (formerly just called API, to distinguish it from Metadata API), Metadata API, Apex, Visualforce, AJAX, Office Toolkit, Force.com Migration Tool, IDE, and the Library.

Core Resources
In addition to a super Documentation page, force.com has a new section which contains, well, resources sectioned by the Platform’s service categories: Logic (Apex), User Interface (Visualforce), Database (Objects, formulas, triggers, etc.), Integration (API, REST), Services —What? We now have Services as a Service?–(Workflow), Packaging and Distribution (AppExchange), Development (Metadata), and Tools (IDE, Force.com Builder, Data Loader).

Now that we’ve seen my two favorite pages, let’s look at the content on the Documentation page:

• Web Services API – No longer in Prerelease, the 14.0 documentation is finalized for 156. Version 13.0 is still online.
• Metadata API – Also no longer in Prerelease, version 14.0 is available. Don’t worry; version 13.0 is still available!
• Visualforce – Also no longer in Prerelease. View Online or PDF.

• Question: Why “release” the prerelease version when it has things we can’t use in Summer 08 orgs? Seems premature.

Note: For those of you wondering about all the 13.0/14.0 and 154/156 references, here’s a guide:
With each release, Salesforce CRM (the new name for the application) increments two numbers.
Releases are generally three times a year, and increment the release number by TWO. Yes, we have only even numbers. So Winter 09 is 156, Winter 08 was 150, Summer 06 was 142, etc. Releases are in Winter, Spring, and Summer of each year, named according to the season in San Francisco, the site of salesforce.com’s corporate headquarters. Counting backwards, some say that the original release was 62. I have no idea why that number was chosen. Of note, salesforce.com refers to its org as 62; maybe that has something to do with it. My bet is that salesforce.com has Unlimited Edition, by the way. Just a hunch.
API versions are incremented by 1 each release. There have been some smaller releases, which is why you might find references to #.1 here and there. As you can see, Summer 08 was version 13, and Winter 09 is version 14.
This is my question: Why do we call the release Winter 09 when it is clearly coming out in 2008? I don’t have an answer to that; does anyone?
Winter 09 Main Page
This is my starting point for all things 156, though I wish the links worked. For more information on specific features, download the PDF files in the sidebar of this page.