A new path forward for browser-based tooling
This Summer, we announced and piloted Salesforce Code Builder – a new, browser-based development experience optimized for Salesforce. Throughout the Pilot, we received positive feedback from you that this was the right path for tooling at Salesforce. You wanted a solution that would serve as a modern, unified, feature-rich successor to products like the Developer Console and Workbench, and we heard you loud and clear.
To deliver a solution optimized for the complete Salesforce development experience —on both the desktop and in the browser— we’re making significant changes to the product we piloted this Summer, based on feedback from Pilot participants. The resulting product will be even more unified with the complete Salesforce Platform, and delivered with the highest expectations for trust and availability. An unfortunate reality of this change is that we must delay the Code Builder Beta – but in this post we’ll share some of the exciting enhancements we’re delivering on the road to Code Builder, and how you can learn more about them.
Investing in a better tooling experience, piece by piece
To improve every facet of the tooling experience on Salesforce, we’re delivering the core capabilities that will make up the complete Code Builder product, as well as ensuring that these new features are made available for both browser-based Code Builder, and desktop-based Visual Studio Code. We’re doubling down on this unified tooling experience by shipping features that we demoed alongside Code Builder at TrailheaDX ‘20 for desktop developers today, starting with the new SOQL Query Builder.
Just two weeks ago, we announced that the SOQL Query Builder is now in Beta and available on the VS Code marketplace, empowering all builders to write SOQL queries faster and more efficiently than ever before! This new Query Builder is backed up by an improved SOQL Language Server. It’s designed to be easy to use for those who prefer to not write code, but also extensible for those who want to quickly render a query, and then use it in something like a new Lightning Web Component.
We’re also continuing to open source the Salesforce CLI, something we started back in May of this year, by breaking out related groups of commands that make up the CLI into open repositories that you can inspect and iterate on. As part of this effort, we’ve recently open sourced the source:deploy and retrieve libraries, as well as refactored a number of other commands to improve performance.
Speaking of deploy and retrieve, have you noticed that things are faster? We’re happy to share that we’ve made some changes under the hood to improve the performance of the CLI and VS Code extensions, resulting in faster deploy and retrieve operations, in addition to related operations such as creating new components. These performance gains are for everyone, and that includes Windows users, who have recently seen 60% faster single file deploys.
See the future of Salesforce Developer Tools at DreamTX
This is just a small sample of what we’ve been up to. To hear much more about the latest and greatest enhancements to Salesforce Developer Tools, check out our DreamTX session: “Everything New in Developer Tools”. We’re live tomorrow, December 17 at 12:00 p.m. PT on the Developer channel.
If that weren’t enough, we’ll also have an awesome, highly technical demo you don’t want to miss, during which we’ll be answering your questions. Join us on December 17 for this interactive session at 10:20 a.m. and 11:40 a.m. PT. Finally, we’ll have an “Ask the Experts” panel live at 9:40 a.m. PT where you can get any other Developer Experience questions answered by our product team. We’re excited to share these new features with you, many of which you’ve been patiently waiting for, so tune in and let us know what you think!
About the author
Claire Bianchi is Director of Product Management for Developer Tools at Salesforce.