Refer to the practical guidance provided in this book to develop Salesforce custom applications in a more agile, collaborative, and resilient way using Salesforce Developer Experience (DX).

You will learn how to use the Salesforce Command Line Interface (CLI) to simplify working with projects, metadata, data and orgs. The CLI integrates with your development tools of choice such as Visual Studio Code, and CI/CD tools to implement DevOps pipelines. Readers will also gain an understanding of the package development model, which improves application quality and maintainability by grouping metadata into highly cohesive, loosely coupled containers.

Salesforce DX supports application development throughout the entire development lifecycle where a version control system, rather than a Salesforce org, is the source of truth. It became generally available in late 2017 and has now reached a stage of feature richness and stability that it is becoming more widely adopted.

Beginning Salesforce DX provides development teams with practical, how-to examples of using Salesforce DX that go beyond the Salesforce documentation. Commands and their parameters are described, including any gotchas, and the outcome of the commands on a Salesforce org is explained.

What You Will Learn

• How to setup a Salesforce DX development environment

• Understand the key Salesforce DX concepts and the Salesforce CLI

• Work with Dev Hubs, projects, orgs, metadata and version control systems

• Improve quality with test users and test data

• Bootstrap pro-code development with templates

• Apply Salesforce DX to an end-to-end package development project

Who This Book Is For

Internal teams developing custom Salesforce applications for an individual customer, or those creating commercial applications for distribution via the Salesforce AppExchange enterprise marketplace. All team disciplines will benefit from understanding and applying Salesforce DX, including pro-code, low-code and no-code developers, testers, release managers, DevOps engineers and administrators. A secondary audience includes those needing to understand key concepts when establishing or evolving an organization's application lifecycle management capability, such as capability leaders, architects, consultants and business analysts.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction

Part I: Preparing for Salesforce DX

Chapter 2: Environment Setup

Chapter 3: Concepts Overview

Part II: Working with Salesforce DX

Chapter 4: Salesforce CLI

Chapter 5: Dev Hub

Chapter 6: Projects

Chapter 7: Orgs

Chapter 8: Metadata

Chapter 9: Version Control

Chapter 10: Test Users

Chapter 11: Test Data

Chapter 12: Development

Chapter 13: Package Development

Book Summary and Resources

About the Author

After graduating from Lancaster University with a degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Ivan spent the first 15 years of his career in the aerospace and defense industry, designing, writing and testing safety-critical embedded software.

During the second half of his career, he held several C-level technology and product leadership roles, helping B2B software companies bring innovative new solutions to market. Domains included games software development tools, information management and security, mobile network optimization, mobile network renewable energy, public cloud application development and artificial intelligence.

More recently, Ivan has focused on creating products that are built on or that integrate with, Salesforce. He has launched five Salesforce AppExchange apps, including his own, and an AI platform that integrates with Service Cloud to provide customer service automation.

Ivan then joined Salesforce as a Senior Program Architect in Australia, working with some of their largest and most complex multi-cloud customers on enterprise transformation projects to help accelerate their time to value.

In September 2022, Ivan joined Provar Testing as their Chief Technology Officer in the UK. Provar provides an end-to-end test automation solution designed especially for Salesforce.

Ivan enjoys running, walking his two dogs, supporting his local rugby union team and listening to his extensive vinyl collection in his spare time.