Winter 25 Release Notes, Apex Pulse, Apex Discovery Triggers, and Rob Cowell's Journey

Happy Friday, and welcome to this week's CloudBites Weekly! It's another jam-packed week of new and exciting tools and announcements - so what do we have for you?

Winter 25 Release Notes

The Winter 25 release notes are out! Grab yourself a coffee and head over here to get reading (obviously after you have finished reading the newsletter ??).

It's another big release with lots of small and big changes so there will surely be something for everyone. Some highlights for me in my browsing:

• Salesforce Archive for helping you save data storage - I know a number of orgs where this will make a huge difference
• Conditional formatting on fields so they stand out on the page - a great way of highlighting certain fields on the page if they needs the user's attention
• User Access Summary updates - inclusion of permissions from profiles and permission sets in the user access summary
• TypeScript support for Lightning Web Components - a nice enhancement for developers
• Local Dev for LWC - seems sandbox only sadly, would love to see this in scratch orgs but this would be a huge developer win
• Free tier event monitoring - so many small exceptions get lost in the ether; this can help you capture them more effectively than using the exception emails
• More LWR Experience Cloud Design Options - LWR experience sites are the future, this makes them much easier to style

What's your favourite feature in the release?

Apex Pulse

We have another Salesforce Labs product released this week - Apex Pulse by Logesh Matheswaran and Goutham Cheedella from Salesforce.

As you can read in Logesh's post here, the app is designed to scan your Apex classes to give you a view of how you can improve the Apex code in your org. I plan on installing it and playing around in some codebases I have next week to see what results I get, but I am excited to see more on platform tools like this. Thanks to Logesh and Goutham for making this and sharing it!

Apex Discovery Trigger Framework

Trigger frameworks are an almost universally accepted and implemented pattern within Apex, and have been so for a long time. So I was interested to see a new framework announced by Aidan Harding of Processity this week.

I'll be honest and did think "do we need another trigger framework", but Aidan is one of the smartest people in the ecosystem so is worth listening to. I'd recommend all developers and architects have a look at his article here as it's extremely interesting and it's an idea that has some legs. Definitely one to go read about and a pattern to add in to your library. The code is all open source as well and is a great example of how to right code that uses the more dynamic features of Apex. A huge thanks to Aidan for sharing this.

Rob Cowell's Salesforce Story

I recently had Rob Cowell from Gearset on the CloudBites Conversations podcast to discuss his Salesforce journey and experiences across multiple roles. I really enjoyed the conversation with Rob and learned a ton about what it means to be a Developer Advocate as well as having a great chat about some more legacy technology and his very cool hobbies in crafting games, music and visualisations. You can watch the whole thing here or search "CloudBites Conversations" in your podcast player of choice. A big thank you to Rob for speaking to me.

That's a wrap!

Thank you for reading, I hope you have enjoyed all the news this week and if you are not subscribed, remember to do so to keep up to date! My tip this week is to spend 5 minutes today jotting down ideas - all and any! You are the only one who will see them, they can be about any topic you want, but see what comes out to get your creative juices flowing. Have a great week!