Parallels is an excellent program for using an IMac for both Apple and PC development (more below), the only issue I encountered to date is that when I remote into my Slate [to develop in Visual Studio 2017] I lost the shift key functionality.

Oddly the CAPS lock key worked but this was not a practical work-around.   I found that if I accessed the Control Center (#1-2 in image below), changed the Keyboard setting to “Optimize for games”, that the issue was resolved – the clue was the message below this dropdown setting.

Where the IMac was purchased so I could develop in the Apple and Android environment (and my wife could use it for her business), I was pleasantly surprised to find out that if I went into “Full Screen” mode (#2 below) that I essentially had a full Windows experience with perks, e.g., I had downloaded an .rar file thinking I would have to find a utility to unpack it.  However, when I double-clicked the file it opened it while in my Windows environment using the Mac OS – very impressive.   “Coherence” is another impressive feature (#1 below), if you select this mode then your Windows applications will open under the Apple OS environment and I could access it via the Windows 10 environment (shared folder space).  With Coherence Windows and Apple applications open side-by-side as if the Windows application was native to it; it was odd seeing Visual Studio 2015 opening under the Mac OS.  

My personal preference is “Full Screen” mode as I can simply hold the control key and press the left and right arrows to switch between environments.  

The advantage of the “let” keyword is that you cannot use a variable before it has been defined (safer).  In contrast “var” does not have to be defined.  The following will compile:

console.log('not defined = ' + notDefinedIsLegal);
var notDefinedIsLegal;

Note in image below [underlined in red] that “let” will complain "error TS2448: Block-scoped variable 'mustBeDefinedBeforeUse' used before its declaration"

In addition, "let" scopes to blocks. Below I define both variables in a block and the definition for the let is limited to the block of code it resides in - this is not the case with var as the output will demonstrate.

console.log('not defined = ' + notDefinedIsLegal);
var notDefinedIsLegal : string;

let mustBeDefinedBeforeUse = 'Hello World';
console.log('mustBeDefined = '+ mustBeDefinedBeforeUse);

{
    var notDefinedIsLegal = "legal!";
    let mustBeDefinedBeforeUse = "Goodbye World!!";
    console.log('[blockscoped] mustBeDefined = '+ mustBeDefinedBeforeUse);
    console.log('[blockscoped] notDefinedIsLegal = ' + notDefinedIsLegal);
}

console.log('mustBeDefined = '+ mustBeDefinedBeforeUse);
console.log('notDefinedIsLegal = '+ notDefinedIsLegal);

results in the following output:

1.  https://chocolatey.org/ to install The package manager for Windows – click “Install Chocolatey Now” button.

2. Copy the cmd.exe or PowerShell.exe command line as applicable (screenshot from install link below).  Note: I don't have them available here as they are likely to be updated.

3. After installation is complete, exit and launch command prompt (CMD.EXE) as administrator and execute the command c:/> choco install nodejs.install as shown in image below:

4. Exit the command window and re-launch the command window; you can now execute the following commands to install typescript and bower

    a. npm install – g typescript

    b. npm install –g bower

More on

• bower: https://bower.io/
• npm: https://www.npmjs.com/
• TypeScript: http://www.typescriptlang.org/
• Node.js: https://nodejs.org/en/

View the chocolatey packages page to see other packages that can be installed: https://chocolatey.org/packages.  I have a command file that contains the following:

  choco install nodejs.install
  choco install 7zip.install
  choco install notepadplusplus.install
  choco install git.install
  choco install visualstudiocode
  choco install github
  choco install visualstudio2017enterprise

I did some minor refactoring and 11 unit test broke - the Welkin Suite makes it simple to step through the code and view variables, but they can’t show me what they aren’t given – the information I need….  

Source code available at https://github.com/BillKrat/LogFolderMonitor  

My test is failing at line 420 but as you can see Salesforce truncates their text so I have no idea what “(28 more)” in the red box below actually means.  This was going to be problematic as this information will not only help me resolve my failures, but also help in creating new unit test (values to test for).   This was impacting my velocity so it was time to roll up my sleeves and crank out a little utility to rectify this.

I created a log folder monitor that will open, parse, and display only the USER_DEBUG content as the log files are created.   This will aid immeasurably, particularly since I use IOC to inject values; it will help me see at a glance what implementation the factory served up for a given interface.   What I am interested in right now is what the friendly message contents are for line 420 above so I can get my test to pass (without digging through my code).  My logger implementation shows that I have “D”ebug statements as well as a “W”arning – it is that last warning I am interested in.  

Since the console is not easy to save (other than a screenshot) I added a “o” keypress option that will open the buffered data in the default editor configured to handle .TXT files.  I hit ‘o’ in the screenshot below and now can easily copy/paste what I need to fix the unit test.  

At a glance I can see the culprit was from my refactoring – I decided that for logging/internal message purposes I didn’t need to keep the LCPT prefix (since all my classes have it) so I stripped them off.   I have unit test that were looking for this (as was failing above) so this was a quick reminder how I can probably fix some of those 11 failing test.

To make the ApexLogMonitor easy to access I added it to “External Tools”, this way I can easily load it when I want to capture logging information.

Note: this C# console application does send all logging statements to the DEBUG output.  This means you can use a utility such as DebugView to see all of the logging information as it becomes available.   The DebugView utility has filtering capabilities so if you want to see only content for a given class you can do something similar to what I have below:

The Welkin Suite Spire R4 (Version 1.1.3.4) Salesforce development platform has a very impressive set of features.  I particularly love the ability to step through my code using the debugger while viewing variables, seeing my code coverage for my unit test (in color), and the ease in which I can deploy from my sandbox to my developer environment (DE) without ever going to a command prompt – everything is point and click, high performance, and easy to use.

I did have a major set back on this last release.  When I right clicked on my class name I saw a feature called Generate Apex Doc For Current Context.  I wasn’t sure what this was, but after a little research found the source code on GitHub along with documentation – I was now going to have to redo all of my documentation…  The set back was not from having to support the ApexDoc format (the Welkin Suite made this easy), but the work I was going to have to do so that the apexdoc.jar application would work seamlessly from within the Welkin Suite.   This required me to add features to ApexDoc, released as GwnV1.x.

My source code fork of the ApexDoc application allowed me to do just this [while maintaining backwards compatibility] I added default features that only require the apexdoc.jar file to be dropped into the solution folder and three entries made to the External Tools menu – steps shown below.

To setup the Welkin Suite to use ApexDoc (GwnV1.x) do the following:

Add the apexdoc.jar application to the Welkin Suite Tools menu: Click on Tools Click on External Tools… Fill in the External Tools dialog as shown on the right With the above settings in place you can select “DOCS: Execute ApexDoc” from the Tools menu which will execute apexdoc.jar using the default settings. Note: the apexdoc.jar file needs to be place in the solution direction for the defaults to work correctly.

Note: above I indicated that the apexdoc.jar file needs to be in the solution folder, to be clear it is assumed that you saved your .sfln file in the same folder as your project file (so that the src folder is at the root as shown below).   If you have multiple projects, each with their own documentation, then you will want to ensure an apexdoc.jar file is dropped into each project folder (or you can put apexdoc.jar in your path and configure the switches).

Once the apexdoc.jar application is executed it will generate the applicable help files and place them in a folder called ApexDocumentation in the solution folder. If your solution folder has a folder called ApexDocContent with the following files they will be automatically used: .header.html .home.html The .header.html file contains the logo and heading information for your application help docs.  In the example below the logo for Global Webnet, LLC is shown.  The .home.html file will display on the “Home” (default) tab of the help page.

The final configuration made in external tools is for the “Edit” feature; this will permit you to easily edit the HTML content for your help pages.   In my case I am using Visual Studio Code, it is a free editor that easily handles html, css, and javascript. I added ./ApexDocContent to the arguments of the code.exe application with a initial directory of the solution folder.   When it executes it loads the application ready to start editing the html documents used by the help system.

Note above [in the screen shot of the documentation] that I have a blue box around a @group Configuration tag and I configure the @group-content location to the ApexDocContent folder.   Below I created a configuration.html it will be looking for.

Below I show what the .home.html file looks like after editing it in the above window:

The solution folder for my CPT application has the apexdoc.jar java application and the ApexDocContent folder which the ApexDoc (GwnV1.x) has been revised to support.  These are the only additional requirements you will have to comply with to take advantage of the ApexDoc features

Click HERE to get the contents of the ApexDocContent folder as well as the latest apexdoc.jar file.

When the apexdoc.jar application is executed it will copy all files (that are not html documents) to the ApexDocumentation folder so that they are available for your documentation.   The html files are not copied because the ApexDoc application has already retrieved the information from them (between the body tags) and has inserted the content into documentation files in the ApexDocumentation folder using the same html filename – thus we need to ensure we don’t copy the html files over (the ApexDoc GwnV1.x application takes care of this for you).

The highlighted files below show the minimum files I recommend for your AppDocContent folder.  The css, js, and logo files can be updated and your updates will replace the ApexDocumentation files so that if you make updates you can utilize them in your documentation, e.g. for THIS PAGE I added magnifier .css and .js files.