Traffic Nightmare @ Dreamforce

This is incredible..last year, the SF Giants were in the playoff hunt so downtown was already jamming. I can't even imagine trying to drive anywhere with over 140k registered attendees this year:

Hey @Benioff, can you do something about this? Maybe next year, a little more dream and a little less force. pic.twitter.com/fqqrHJB7g4

— dick costolo (@dickc) November 20, 2013

Drink the Kool Aid, It's DreamForce Season Again!

Salesforce1 appears to be the big announcement this year.  I just watched this video that Salesforce published and while the music and voice over are great, I don't understand a thing about what is being announced.  If you can make sense of this video, please share in the comments.

A Bug!

It's not often that I come across a real bug with Salesforce's apex or visualforce platform.  Most often there are limitations or shortcomings that you have to workaround.  Recently, I had to make an urgent change to a trigger and it's associated test class.  However, when I attempted to comment out a line in my test class, I got the following error in the editor when I tried to save:

java.lang.reflect.InvocationTargetException

When I attempted to make the same change in the developer console, I got another error:

 An unexpected error has occurred. 421011484-16071 (1420197083) for deploymentId=1drJ00000002FDxIAM If this persists, please contact customer support.

Fortunately, I was able to still deploy my code without the test class change but I opened a case anyway and after waiting a few days for a reply, was told that it was a known issue.  The instructions from developer support were:

• Please clear Test results and try to save the code:
• From Setup, click Develop | Apex Test Execution |View Test History | Clear test results. 

However, even before I did these actions, I tried to update the test class again and surprise!  no errors. So, something fishy is going on... Support wants to close the case but I'm inquiring for additional details.  Will keep you posted.

**Update Nov 13**

Salesforce has responded and indicated that it was a bug but has been fixed.  Details here: https://success.salesforce.com/issues_view?id=a1p30000000T17j

Workflow and User Permissions

Q: Do workflow rules run as the user or do they run as the system?  For example, if you had a sales team associate update an opportunity and there was a workflow that fired on any opportunity edit, would the workflow update a field that the user did not have profile (or permission set) permission to update?

Q: If the workflow action reassigned ownership to another user, would it execute the ownership change despite the user's system permission of Transfer Records as false?

Q: If the workflow action changed the record type to a value, would it change the record type if the user's profile did not have access to the specific record type value?

***

My initial reaction was that workflow would run as the logged in user and would obey the user's profile and permission sets.  However upon testing, what I found was that workflow runs as the system and does not honor the user's profile or permission.  So, for the 3 questions above:

1. Workflows run as the system and would update a field that the user did not have profile/permission set access to update
2. Workflows will execute ownership changes on behalf of users who do not have permission to directly change the ownership
3. Workflows will change record types in spite of profile-specified record type access.