VS Code and Salesforce Extensions
By the end of this lesson, you'll be able to:
- Explain why professional teams prefer VS Code over the Developer Console for real project work
- Identify the Salesforce Extension Pack and what it adds to VS Code
- Understand the role of a Salesforce DX project folder structure at a glance
Prerequisites: "Developer Console"
Why not just use the Developer Console for everything?
The Developer Console is fantastic for quick experiments — which is exactly what you've used it for so far. But it has no real version control (no Git), makes it awkward to work across many files at once, and doesn't support the team workflows (code review, branching) covered later in this course.
VS Code, Microsoft's free code editor, becomes a full Salesforce development environment once you install Salesforce's Extension Pack — a bundle of extensions Salesforce itself maintains.
What the Extension Pack adds
- Apex syntax highlighting and autocomplete (knows about sObjects, SOQL, and your org's own custom fields)
- The ability to retrieve and deploy metadata directly between your laptop and a Salesforce org
- An integrated Apex debugger
- Built-in Git support, since VS Code is a general-purpose editor first
None of this requires you to install anything on Salesforce's side — it's all client-side tooling that talks to your org over its API, the same way any Salesforce integration does.
A first look at project structure
A Salesforce DX project (you'll build one properly in the "Salesforce DX and DevOps" module) has a predictable shape: a force-app folder containing classes, triggers, lwc, and similar subfolders — each Apex class becomes its own .cls file plus a small .cls-meta.xml file describing it. You don't need to memorize this yet; just recognize the shape when you see it later.
Exercise
If you have VS Code installed, open its Extensions panel and search for 'Salesforce Extension Pack.' Read its description and note two features it lists that weren't covered in this lesson.
Show hint
This is a research task, not a coding one — no org connection required to complete it.
VS Code and Salesforce Extensions Quiz
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Summary
VS Code, with Salesforce's official Extension Pack installed, is where professional Salesforce development actually happens — it adds real version control, proper autocomplete, and the ability to work with a whole project's worth of code at once, none of which the Developer Console offers.