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The Salesforce metadata API is an extremely powerful tool, when combined with Ant, Jenkins etc. for build automation. There is however a number of configuration items that simply can’t be retrieved and deployed using this API (Account Teams, Support Settings, Lead Settings, Case Assignment and Escalation Rules etc.). The unsupported list can be found here, […]
If your deployment process involves manual modification of the metadata files between retrieve and deploy steps, it’s time to consider extending your knowledge of Ant. This is critical for Continuous Integration where manual processes are an anathema. With a small amount of Ant knowledge you can delete metadata files, edit and replace/remove content via regex, […]
I’ve always considered programming to sit somewhere between art and science, the “art of programming” being a phrase I like. Whilst the language syntax, underlying algorithms and platforms are definitely scientific in their absolute nature, the code we write is less definitive, more personal and in my view a creative process. As with any creative […]
I’m a big advocate of setting out the key elements of the development process succinctly but unambiguously at the start of a software development project, particularly in cases where I have no prior history of working with the development team. Such process elements typically cover environments, coding standards, technical design and review requirements, source-code control […]
A robust and intelligent data model provides the foundation upon which a custom Salesforce implementation can be built. Mistakes made in the functional or technical build are typically inexpensive to rectify (if caught quick enough), however a flawed data model can be incredibly time and cost expensive to mitigate. At the start of all projects […]
Some 18 years ago I attended a Microsoft developer academy event in Cambridge (UK) – one of the sessions I attended was delivered by Alan Cooper and addressed the topic of interaction design. This session had a fundamental impact on how I viewed software development – and still influences my thinking today. I can’t recommend […]
There are typically two interpretations of the term “development process” – one being the tools, practices and methods applied in software development (i.e. methodology, plus build automation, standards etc.) the other being the process applied to get from requirements to working software (i.e. iterative or waterfall, plus how the analysis-design-build-test-release disciplines are executed). This post […]
This brief post illustrates how Ant scripts can be used in a continuous integration scenario, i.e. where metadata is held in a source code control (SCC) repository such as Subversion. In a CI scenario developers would typically be working in isolated developer orgs with periodic commits of unit tested code to SCC following peer-review (hopefully). […]
What is it? In essence CI is an aggressive build strategy requiring the isolated work of project developers to be integrated immediately following code commits to a shared source-code control system. Regression tests are run automatically, surfacing build errors or code inconsistency at an early stage. CI is viewed as an Agile practice and is […]
