All developers have their favorite IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that they prefer to use. If you’re a Salesforce developer, you’ve perhaps noticed that many different options have cropped up over the past several years for us to code in. How do you know where to start if you’re new to the Salesforce ecosystem? Or even if you’re a seasoned Salesforce developer, why should you explore other options if you’re already comfortable with the IDE you’ve been using?

Salesforce developers can quickly become overwhelmed with the endless choices of development environments that are offered by Salesforce and by the community. Some well-known options include the built-in Developer Console as well as desktop IDEs like the Eclipse Force.com IDE, Visual Studio Code with MavensMate, and Illuminated Cloud for IntelliJ – and that’s only the tip of the iceberg. With so many different options, how can you know which one is best for you?

In the most recent Salesforce Play-by-Play on Pluralsight, Don Robins challenged me to explore these questions and walk through a real-world development scenario. Check it out!

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The amount of training resources out there compared to when I started developing on the Salesforce platform in 2012 is astounding! It doesn’t matter whether you want to learn how to use Salesforce as a sales professional, marketer, administrator, developer, or whatever your role may be – there are “trails” out there for you.

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By now most of us are probably well aware of the various communication tools that are available to help you stay connected to your coworkers, especially if you have coworkers spread out around the world. Applications like Slack, Hipchat, and Google Hangouts are all different options that many companies use to promote sharing, collaboration, and transparency.

These tools are great for staying connected to your coworkers. But how do you stay connected to your overall community? The Salesforce community is expanding daily. There are several ways to share knowledge, including but not limited to the Salesforce StackExchange, the Twitter #askforce, and the hundreds of groups on the Salesforce Success Community.

However, there’s a missing gap here. What about real-time interactions?

Hello, Slackforce!

A former colleague of mine started a new community on Slack specifically for Salesforce administrators and developers. In the short amount of time it has been around, we’ve already seen great discussions and collaboration on lightning best practices, studying for certification exams, and more.

Interested? If you want to join us, please reach out by sending an email to me at robert [at] robertwatson.me and I’ll happily give you an invite URL.

Hope to chat with you soon!

— Robert

Last year I gave a talk with Dan Appleman at the 2016 Dreamforce conference and blogged about it here. While it’s only been a few months, it’s time for an update!

In perusing the Salesforce StackExchange recently, I realized that a lot of people post questions on the forum when they run into a CPU limit exception but there isn’t much content published on how to avoid hitting such errors. Furthermore, I also discovered that Adrian Larson developed an unmanaged package for profiling CPU time, amongst other Salesforce limits: the LimitsProfiler.

As a result of both of these things, I’ve published a Q&A on the StackExchange that goes into more detail on how to benchmark CPU time using the LimitsProfiler: “How can you benchmark Apex code to determine what operations consume the most CPU time?” – I hope that you’ll find it useful and share!

— Robert

There is quite a bit of good information and resources out there on using the DateTime class in Salesforce. In fact, the Salesforce Apex Developer Guide itself has published great examples on using this class.

However if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past 5 years of professional development, it’s this: writing code using dates and time zones is a developer’s worst nightmare. From fixing unit tests on January 1st because a date was hardcoded and somehow made it past code review, to a client in another country complaining that something is broken because they told the system to exclude certain dates and it didn’t listen… I can’t possibly remember all of the stories I’ve heard.

So let’s take a deeper dive into the DateTime class with a few additional examples. Hopefully you’ll learn a thing or two – I know I have.

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