The Welkin Suite Blog

How to make software development on the Salesforce platform developer-friendly?

While building applications, software engineers use different tools to write and debug code. When we started Salesforce development back in 2013, we couldn’t find a tool that would ideally meet our needs. This led us to build our own one based on Visual Studio - well-known, very popular, and built with an idea of a comfortable development tool in mind, multifunctional IDE. As a result, we received a brand new tool for Salesforce development and administration. We can rightfully call it a success as today it is popular and in demand both in the corporate world and in the freelance consultants’ environment. 

Maybe you have already noticed that The Welkin Suite really enjoys cutting trail and getting to new places before anyone else. Looking back on the trails we blazed, the Welkin suite was the first IDE to spearhead the effort to have a retrospective debugger, and we are proud that this pushed the other players to incorporate this technology to make life easier for Developers. The Welkin Suite was also the first IDE to look at how Salesforce Administrators really didn’t have any powerful tools, and because of that, they had to waist a lot of time to work on really quite simple, but yet time-consuming operations like managing permission sets. And because of that, we were the first to start to deliver a fully functional integrated workplace for Salesforce Admins, and thousands of people are using it right now to save boatloads of time.

With the ax falling on the Force.com IDE, with its depreciation date set by Salesforce this coming October, I have been getting a lot of questions from our perspective users about why it makes sense to pay for The Welkin Suite when there is the alternative of using Visual Studio Code for free. Also, even a few handful of our current users have asked us what our thoughts are on this, as they just want to maintain their due diligence in making sure they are using the best tool out there for their money. And being honest it is a good question that needs to be answered because as a wise person once said, “if it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make dollars.”

So I have tried to put together as many of the answers Vladimir, our head of product, and I have given on this subject into this article to help you out if you have had similar questions running around your head about what is the business case of “Why The Welkin Suite is worth the cost over V.S. Code?”, or “How do I keep justifying spending money for The Welkin Suite when there is the fact V.S. Code is free and has many Salesforce Extensions?”.

Dear Salesforce community and The Welkin Suite users, 

While everyone is busy with this Holidays season, The Welkin Suite team is working hard on implementing one more very cool feature in the Salesforce configuration area. The one that will nicely extend the Field Level Security configuration options, and fulfill a lot of requests that we've received from you - Objects Permissions Editor. Let's take a quick look at what expects us in the first release of the new 2019 year when this feature will be ready to see the world 

Have you thought what it would be like to have all the metadata from your org in your The Welkin Suite project, but still be able to work with the ones that you most commonly use in the fastest possible way? 

Or, have you ever wanted to feed your Git repo or plain sources directly to TWS, to have a more seamless workflow?

Or, maybe, you were missing some deploy or retrieve options in the IDE?

All of these and even more The Welkin Suite new features will be shown in details during our Release Highlights Webinar on July 26th - sign-up for it and be prepared to this game-changing release of The Welkin Suite IDE!

The Welkin Suite is about to roll out a great release, and I would like to highlight that it’s totally based on your feedback and requests! Some of you may have already seen our announcement on this release of The Welkin Suite but if you missed it - you can check it out here.

This version of the IDE is really full of significant changes for different parts of the IDE's functionality. And now, I would like to clarify some more details to warm up your interest! :) So what makes this version so important? 

A promising title, isn't it? Believe me or not, but the upcoming release itself is even more promising! So let me tell you what's going on, we've heard a lot of feedback from different sources related to the way of how The Welkin Suite works with Salesforce organizations, and thank you for that. And in those feedbacks, we have heard some very helpful critics that were mostly related to the following aspects:

• A lack of support for the %Put_Your_Metadata_Name_Here% metadata type
• A rock-solid connection of a project tothe organization, without any option to easily switch between orgs with the same sources
• Unbeatable safeguards that prevent you from overwriting something in Salesforce
• A lack of a way to work with plain "src" folder in the IDE

You know what? All of this (and even more) will be resolved in the next 2 weeks, and in this post, we will highlight to you some of the details with very early screenshots.

Now, there are a lot of reports about DF. And I thought why should I stand out? So I also decided to write my own report about Dreamforce. However, most of the reports were written by visitors, and as I was staying at our booth almost the whole Dreamforce, I think that my vision will be quite unique and so I hope interesting as well. ))

This past weekend in the Salesforce world was marked by an awesome event in New Dehli - IndiaDreamin'17!

The Welkin Suite definitely couldn't miss out on the first ever Salesforce Dreamin event in India, and what a great conference it was!!!  Rustam Nurgudin is excited to share what he saw and felt, plus his takeaways from his very first experience in visiting India, talking to Indian's great Salesforce developers and administrators, and sharing knowledge and experiences between the many people from all parts of the world, who were at this event soon.