Introducing Salesforce DX

Throughout this book, we will be using the Salesforce DX tool. Salesforce provides this tool for developers to perform many development and time-saving tasks, such as creating developer environments (known as Scratch Orgs), creating projects, synchronizing code with source control, creating and managing packages, and much more. In fact, it optimizes and helps you automate the entire Application Life Cycle (ALM) process for your application and package. Throughout this book, you will learn key aspects of this process, starting in this chapter.

We will dive straight into using this tool's Command Line Interface (CLI) along with an Integrated Development Environment (IDE), Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VSCode), for which Salesforce has also created many useful extensions. You do not need to be an expert in Salesforce DX to complete this book but I do recommend you take the time to complete the basic Trailhead trails: https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/trails/sfdx_get_started.

Salesforce DX brings with it the second generation of packaging technology for ISVs building on the Lightning Platform; this is known as 2GP for short. Previous editions of this book used the first generation technology (1GP). If you were to compare the experience between the two technologies, you would see that the package creation process using 2GPs is now fully automated through the CLI and requires no UI interaction. This is also very advantageous in respect of building further automation around your release pipeline, which will be covered in Chapter 13, Source Control and Continuous Integration. This book focuses on creating new ISV packages and not migrating between 1GP and 2GP for existing packages. You can read more about 1GP and 2GP at https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.sfdx_dev.meta/sfdx_dev/sfdx_dev_build_and_release_your_app.htm.