Obamakin

Last Updated on Wednesday, 4 March 2009 05:37 Written by Steve Friday, 31 October 2008 03:41

School Hallway

Last Updated on Wednesday, 4 March 2009 05:38 Written by Steve Friday, 31 October 2008 01:24

Salmon Bay school in Seattle.

Force.com IDE v.14 released today

Last Updated on Tuesday, 28 October 2008 08:16 Written by Steve Tuesday, 28 October 2008 08:16

All I can say is Bravo to Jon Plax and his team over at Salesforce.com. On first look the new IDE released this morning is absolutely excellent.

My main issue with the v.13 IDE had to do with the organization of source files. This has been fixed in v.14 with a new reorganization based on type (class, trigger, static resrouce, etc.) Things are much, much easier to find now. Thank you!

On project setup you are now greeted with a wizard that allows you to select different types of objects. This is brilliant, because there are now 25 different types available! Pulling all of them for every project would have gotten tiresome.

Two massive time-savers come from the addition of reports and dashboards as metadata types. Here’s an example use case: Each of our consulting staff has a dashboard of key performance indicators specific to them. The dashboards are identical in look, but the reports are different. Now, we can set up one set of dashboards with underlying reports and then use the IDE to essentially clone them for each staff member, changing them slightly.

I can’t wait to use it more deeply–as I’ll have the chance to do over the next couple days. It already feels like this is a tool I’ll be much happier to be using every day. Excellent work Salesforce.com!