Something has always bothered me a bit about conferences. The reveal of large new roadmap features mid-conference. A day of sessions has already gone by, and now there is a keynote telling you about a great new feature that you want to learn more about before the end of the conference. What to do? Ditch all the other sessions that you have otherwise already carefully selected to start learning about a new feature from scratch?
The recent Salesforce global Lightning Experience event has bypassed that by moving the big announcement to a few weeks out before the conference starts. There is some lead time for delegates to adjust session schedules and hit the conference with some knowledge of what they are getting themselves into.
With Dreamforce 2015 just around the corner, it's a great time to get ahead and get yourself some of that preparation knowledge for the changes that are going to occur to the core user interface.
The Developer Trail - Lightning Experience brings together 5 modules that cover areas of interest to a developer.
With the Lightning experience being so new and not available in all orgs yet (not GA), the modules mostly use multi-choice questions in the evaluation rather than inspecting your connected developer edition org. You will however cover some important topics, such as:
- learning what features you will gain (and potentially lose) when enabling it - Deciding If Lightning Experience Is Right for You
- how to turn actually it on. Enabling Lightning Experience. Grabbing a Winter '16 pre-release org before Dreamforce and having it setup could be useful.
- how to leverage existing Visualforce - Visualforce & Lightning Experience
- how to fit in the the Lightning look and feel without hacking the CSS - Lightning Design System
You also get to learn the importance of having good admins and not letting the developers do the rollout to a large org. Confetti canons for Everyone!
Once the developer trail is completed, some of the modules have cross over with other trials. Such as the Lightning Experience Basics, which is the starting point for some of the trails. So you would already have a good start on Admin Trail - Migrating to Lightning Experience.
See Also:
- Some of my Dreamforce 2015 Session picks
- Apex Testing Tips and Tricks at Community Campfire A. A discussion, sans-slides, on useful tools and techniques for testing Apex. Bring your own ideas, as it is supposed to be interactive rather than just me talking to an audience.
