Author: Kyle Ballard

by Kyle Ballard on Programming, Salesforce

API Management with Docker and Mulesoft Anypoint Flex Gateway

How many APIs exist inside your organization? Dozens? Hundreds? How are you keeping track of access, security, and policies on those APIs? Are you getting consistent alerts if any of those services go down? If you are trying to manually manage each of those individually, you may wish to consider using an API management solution. API management is a critical component to your suite of integration capabilities which allows you to centrally monitor, secure, and deploy your organizations API connectivity and is essential to reliably ensure maintain, monitor, and secure your APIs. Learn more in this post on how to work with Flex Gateway and Docker.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Conferences, Programming, Salesforce

TrailblazerDX 2022: Recap

Wow, it’s good to be back. What an event. After two years without any in-person activities, it was a surreal experience to say the least. Salesforce did an excellent job getting folks in and out of the venue, and making the whole event as well-run as we’ve all come to expect from them. The keynotes, sessions, and the concert experience (Weezer) were all very memorable, and they covered a ton of ground. There were a few stand-out items for me that I took particular note of and I’d like to discuss them here.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Programming, Salesforce

Developer Introduction to Salesforce B2C Commerce Cloud

In 2016, Salesforce acquired a company known as Demandware, and re-branded their solution as Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Later, in 2018, Salesforce acquired a company known as CloudCraze, and that later became known as Salesforce B2B Commerce, and the original Demandware acquisition became known as B2C Commerce. One key difference between these two solutions is that the B2B Commerce product runs “on platform”, and the B2C (Demandware) product does not.

The development paradigm for B2C Commerce Cloud relies on developer knowledge of server-side Javascript (similar to NodeJS, but is actually Rhino Javascript). Similar to the Marketing Cloud (ExactTarget) product, developers who are used to developing with Salesforce DX, Lightning Web Components, and Apex will find that there is none of that here. The entire solution is different, however that has changed somewhat with the introduction of add-on products like Salesforce OMS, Salesforce Loyalty, and other features which run on-platform, but are integrated with B2C Commerce. Additionally, there is in-fact, an accelerator from Mulesoft, which will let you quickly connect your B2C Commerce instance to your core sales/service instance(s). It is not required to integrate the two, but does greatly simplify the process.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Conferences, General

How to Deliver an Amazing Software Demo

Having worked in software development for nearly 20 years, I’ve had a number of opportunities to speak in public (local user groups, conferences, webinars, sales engagements). The last 3 years I have worked exclusively as a solutions engineer, meaning that part of my responsibilities at work, is to actively speak to others about technology.

I decided to put together some notes I had about things I’ve learned over the years, that I feel may be useful to others looking to pursue a similar career path, or just to become more comfortable and relaxed in a public speaking environment. I tried to organize this list in a an easily digestible format, so anyone who wanted to, could reference it quickly/easily.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Programming, Salesforce

Developer Introduction to Mulesoft

If you’ve been a developer for any length of time, you’ve been tasked with connecting data from system A to system B. It could be data from your ERP to your Ecommerce web store, or it might be from your CRM to your Marketing tools. These ‘point to point’ integrations work well when a business is in it’s infancy along the path of digital transformation. Unfortunately, as the number of point to point integrations grows, so does the complexity of trying to maintain those systems. They become so fragile, and so unstable, that the entire IT team is afraid to touch them let alone replace them (which would feel like a herculean task). In addition, dev teams outside of central IT are slowed down because central IT is spending all of their time maintaining and keeping those systems working and online. What if there was a better way?

 
by Kyle Ballard on Salesforce

Complete Developer Introduction to Salesforce Marketing Cloud

In this guide, I will summarize (in some detail) the high-level features that are available to you as a seasoned developer on the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform. I will review basics of the platform, some advanced platform features, platform-specific programming languages, integration support, API support, platform SDKs, and I’ll also discuss next steps you may wish to take in terms of Salesforce certifications. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform is an Enterprise grade solution and well suited for much more than basic email subscriptions. After reading this guide you’ll have a good understanding of what is possible on the solution and how you can launch, iterate, and transform your Marketing efforts at your business and what is expected from your dev team to support those efforts.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Salesforce

Serverless Salesforce Messaging with Azure Functions

The new computing paradigm of serverless allows developers to quickly spin up, prototype, and build out applications using inexpensive usage based resources. In this article, we’re going to go over how to connect your Salesforce Outbound Messages to Azure Functions for processing. As of this writing, as far as I’m aware, there are no governor limits on Outbound Messages and also Azure Functions are priced at $0.20/million executions with 1 million in the free grant per month. If you’re not already comfortable working with Outbound Messages in .NET, I’ve got you covered with a post on this topic I did previously.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Salesforce

Developer Introduction to Salesforce CMS

CMS stands for Content Management System. The most well-known CMS today is Wordpress. Common components of a CMS are content administration features (authoring tools for content like blogs, news, events, white papers, etc) in addition to content delivery capabilities that renders the content for consumption, such as a web page or over an API.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Salesforce

Working with Salesforce Outbound Messages in .NET

Outbound Messages in Salesforce are another way for your application to receive notifications of changes to your Salesforce data. Imagine you have a scenario, where you would like your external application to be notified whenever a Lead record in Salesforce is created (or edited) and the City field on the Lead is set to Chicago. It is possible in Salesforce, using an Outbound Message which is triggered from a Workflow Rule like the one I just described. I’ll discuss in detail what both of those Salesforce features are in this post.

 
by Kyle Ballard on Salesforce

Getting Started with the Salesforce Streaming API in .NET Core

Have you ever wished you could get a notification whenever a record type or subset of records changed in Salesforce? You may wish to be able to be notified of those changes for replicating data or to trigger behavior or an external business system.

Enter the Streaming API from Salesforce. This feature consists of several subfeatures which enable you to just that. Opting in to certain changes is possible with Push Topics. Getting a complete list of changes of everything is possible with Change Data Capture. We’re going to talk about both in this post and how you can integrate your .NET applications with Salesforce to capture those changes in near real-time.