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At the front of any great business application is a great user interface; easy to use, powerful and suited exactly for the tasks, users and devices the application serves. Force.com’s Visualforce provides a complete framework for building and deploying any kind of user experience, and enabling any kind of interface design and interaction to be built and delivered entirely on demand. These user interfaces can extend the standard Force.com look and feel, or replace it with a completely unique style and set of sophisticated interactions, allowing the power of Platform-as-a-Service can be extended to virtually any requirement.

Overview of Visualforce

Not familiar with Visualforce yet? Check out these resources for an overview:

• 
  An Introduction to Visualforce A comprehensive technical introduction to Visualforce, covering all aspects of the technology.
• 
  Whitepaper: Visualforce A very high-level overview of Visualforce, which looks at its place on the platform and interactions with other technologies.
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  Visualforce Technical Overview This screencast presentation explains Visualforce, and walks you through the basics of how you can use it to build powerful user experiences into your on-demand apps.
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  Introducing Visualforce - Create Any User Interface as a Service Get in-depth coverage provided by top salesforce.com technical experts.
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  Visualforce and Visualforce Components Demo This 5-minute screencast shows the power of embedding default and custom Visualforce Components to create a dynamic user interface.

Technical Introductions

Ready to start coding? Check out the following tutorials and articles:

• 
  An Introduction to Visualforce:A comprehensive technical introduction to Visualforce, covering all aspects of the technology.
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  Force.com Tutorial: An Introduction to Visualforce: This article provides a series of tutorials that contain enough material for you to get started building your own applications utilizing Visualforce.
• 
  Using Browser Technologies in Visualforce - Provides an overview of how standard browser technologies, including AJAX and Flex, relate to Visualforce pages. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
• 
  Force.com for ASP.NET Developers: This article provides a dive deep into using the Force.com Platform Web Services to access your Salesforce.com data from within a Visualforce page or from within a Microsoft ASP.NET Web form.
• 
  Build Any UI for Any App Using Visualforce: This presentation from Dreamforce '08 shows how to customize and componentize common UI elements and easily add them to Visualforce Pages.
• 
  Visualforce Controllers and Components: Building Reusable UI Building Blocks: This technical introduction to Visualforce includes code walkthroughs and covers topics such as components and common use cases.

Reference Material

HTML | PDF

PREVIEW Version 16.0 for Summer '09: HTML | PDF

(Audience: Developers) Reference for Visualforce, a tag-based markup language that allows you to build custom user interfaces for your apps.

Other Articles

• 
  Security Tips for Apex and Visualforce Developers

Code Samples

Here's a list of code samples to help you get started.

• Extended Print Preview - How to use Visualforce to create extended print previews
• Dynamic Edit Page - How to augments another component, giving it some Ajax behavior for the purpose of controlling the visibility of a section of the given Visualforce page dynamically as the user modifies values in a form.

Cookbook Code

The following code comes straight from the free Force.com Cookbook.

• First Visualforce page
• Controller code for AJAX Visualforce page
• Visualforce page with AJAX code
• Visualforce page passing parameters to controller
• Basic Visualforce page accessing Salesforce data
• Basic Visualforce form page
• Controller code for basic table of data
• Page code for basic table of data
• Simple Visualforce custom controller
• Visualforce page for simple custom controller
• Second simple Visualforce custom controller
• Visualforce page for second simple custom controller

Cookbook Opportunity Wizard

• Controller code for new Opportunity wizard
• Page 1 for new Opportunity wizard
• Page 2 for new Opportunity wizard
• Page 3 for new Opportunity wizard

Other Visualforce Code and Project Examples

• Creating custom tab for a single Record Type-An example using Visualforce page to replicate a home tab for a single account record type
• Creating a simple blog application-An example of using an Apex page to build a simple Blog app, uses YUI rich text widget
• Wrapper Class-Use a wrapper class to incorporate checkboxes into a data table
• Sorting Tables- An example that shows you how to sort lists that contain Standard or Custom objects and create a sortable table