Did you hear? It’s Dreamforce week! Yes, our Trailblazer family reunion is finally here, the days are a tad shorter, and PSLs have begun to reemerge on menus near and far (that’s “Pumpkin Spice Lattes,” but if you read that and thought “Permission Set Licenses,” then you’re definitely one of our people!). All of this means it’s time yet again for another jam-packed Winter release for Admins and Developers! We know each release brings with it lots of amazing new functionality, and there can be a lot to digest. With Learn MOAR, we’re packaging the release and bringing it to you in an easy-to-digest format with blogs, videos, and more.

Warm up with Winter ’23!

It’s easy to get started:

• Dig into the Trailhead trailmixes with the key release highlights for admins or developers, or both!
• Follow along each day this week as we publish blogs highlighting all the great new features on both the Salesforce Developer and Salesforce Admin blogs.
• Get ready for Developer Release Readiness Live! For the first time ever, Release Readiness Live will be live at Dreamforce! Join product experts and developer advocates to hear about new Winter ’23 release features. If you’re joining Dreamforce in person, join the session on September 22 at 11:00 a.m. PT. Tuning in to Dreamforce virtually this year? Join us for a live broadcast.

Follow and complete a Learn MOAR Winter ‘23 trailmix for admins or developers by November 30, 2022, 11:59 pm PT, to earn a special community badge and enter for a chance to win one of five $200 USD Salesforce Certification vouchers. Restrictions apply. Learn how to participate and review the Official Rules by visiting the Trailhead Quests page.

Generally Available features

The Salesforce Winter ’23 release is upon us, and it comes with great new features for developers. We’ve put together a list of features that we think you should look out for, including these that are now Generally Available:

GraphQL API — If you’ve been stopping by the blog over the past few months, you know we’ve been excited to share our development on the new Salesforce GraphQL API. Well, that GraphQL API is now GA! The initial schema that we’re delivering enables you to page, filter, and order your UI API exposed sObjects. In addition to being highly performant and scalable, it grants you the ability to query and obtain the exact data you need in one request: nothing more, nothing less. Check out our awesome GraphQL API Developer Guide for code samples!

Quick Clone for Sandboxes on Hyperforce — We know that sandbox copy times can be lengthy, and this is never a great experience. Thankfully, Hyperforce is changing this starting in the Winter ’23 release with Quick Clone for Developer and Developer Pro Sandboxes on Hyperforce! Quick Clone is a new capability for sandboxes on Hyperforce that will make clone times significantly faster, leading to faster copy times for individual developer environments or those used for QA, better use of sandboxes in your CI pipelines, and shorter release cycles overall.

Event Relay for AWS — It’s been a great summer for event-driven architectures, first with the GA of the Pub Sub API that simplifies how teams publish and consume events across Salesforce, and now extending to AWS with our newly GA’d Event Relay for AWS! You can now natively publish events to Amazon EventBridge without the need for custom-coded listeners or other middleware.

DevOps Center — Currently in Beta, DevOps Center is a low-code change and release management solution that we know many of you are eagerly awaiting — and you won’t have to wait much longer! We’re targeting an early December GA for DevOps Center, which provides a convenient abstraction over GitHub branches and typical Git-based workflows, enabling more teams to participate in the release management process.

Feature enhancements

Salesforce Connect Adapter for Amazon Athena — Amazon Athena fans, there’s great news ahead! We continue to expand on our AWS partnership and are excited to share that customers can now access data managed by Amazon Athena from within Salesforce. It’s all without the need for standing up middleware, providing the same great External Object experience for structured data stored in Amazon S3. This means you’ll be able to use Reports and Dashboards with External Objects exposed through Athena, and access that Athena data using SOQL and Apex (without DML).

New Standard Component for Embedding Screen Flows in LWC — If you’ve poked around the Admin blog once or twice, you know we love some Flow, and so we’re very excited to introduce the new lightning-flow component! Now you can easily embed your Screen Flows in LWCs, and also customize what it does: from unique finishing behavior, to custom styling, and much more. Here’s an example of what that would look like with a customer survey Flow:

Preview and Pilot features

Currently in Pilot, we’ve now introduced a new feature that allows you to synchronize component data without a page refresh by using the RefreshView API. Until now, LWC did not feature an API for refreshing data without going ahead and refreshing the entire page. This Pilot changes that, enabling developers to update the data for a specific hierarchy of components without reloading the whole page.

Next up — the ability to build components in Mixed Shadow Mode is now in Beta. If you’re new to this one, Mixed shadow mode enables LWCs to use the native shadow DOM even when the synthetic shadow polyfill is applied, such as for older versions of Microsoft Edge. This means that developers simplify testing and building by tapping into the speed and efficiency of native shadow wherever you can in your app, while creating a graceful path towards migration to native shadow fully in the future. To enable mixed shadow mode on a component, set the static shadowSupportMode property to any:

Another great Beta for those of you building in Experience Cloud is the ability to upgrade your site deployments with new Metadata API types! That means using familiar commands to deploy LWR sites programmatically, and the concept of content as metadata. Following the image below, when you retrieve the DigitalExperienceBundle, your site workspaces are stored in the site folder (1). Each of your enhanced LWR sites has its own workspace (2), where folders for each content type (3) organize the individual content items (4) that make up the site.

For developers building for Slack, we’re also happy to share that the Apex SDK for Slack is now in Beta. If you’re around for Dreamforce, you’ll be seeing some exciting new things with this one, but with the Beta we’re enabling teams to use the Apex skills they already have to build custom experiences in Slack, and do so without needing to master Block Kit, or without needing to stand up and maintain a middleware connection. This Beta release will also bring with it streamlined management of internal and external users, giving you greater control over access to data within the new UIs you deliver.

Lastly, we hope you didn’t miss the recently announced Beta for Code Builder! Code Builder is a modern, Salesforce-optimized IDE in your browser. Now, developers and admins have the flexibility to use our Salesforce VS Code Extensions for desktop VS Code, or deploy a fully-featured, pre-configured development environment in their browser, right from their org. Check out this video to see a recent tour of Code Builder in action by Mohith Shrivastava, one of our awesome Developer Advocates!

See these new features in action!

Don’t forget to watch the Winter ’23 Developer Preview on September 22 during Release Readiness Live to see demos of a subset of these new, exciting features. And if you’re attending Dreamforce, join us LIVE! Be sure to check out the Learn MOAR Winter ’23 for Developers trailmix and follow along on the blog this week for more Learn MOAR!

About the author

Ryan Schellack is the Director of Product Marketing for the Salesforce Platform. His team focuses on developer services, DevOps, AI, and automation. You can follow him on Twitter @rschellack.