Back in 2016, I wrote a post here about how the Force.com IDE was making an epic comeback, with support for Lightning. At the time I was very excited to see that Salesforce was refocusing it’s efforts towards improving that tool in the form of a Beta. Even though the Force.com IDE was the original tool that Salesforce offered and it had a long history with the development community, it had failed to keep up with the bevy of tools now being offered by third-parties.
Fast forward to today and the recent announcement by Salesforce that the Force.com IDE Beta has been officially discontinued.
So where does that leave Salesforce developers?
Well, not as bad as you might think. Salesforce is not giving up on supporting a local IDE. Nor are they giving up on the original version of the Force.com IDE (at least not just yet). So far, only the new Beta will be discontinued.
It is just that they are focusing their efforts towards improvement of the Salesforce Extensions for Visual Studio (VS) Code. It just made no sense to support two tools and after analyzing feedback from the Beta of the Force.com IDE, the team had to make a clear choice and Salesforce Extensions for VS Code came up the winner.
I personally prefer Visual Studio Code and there is no question that it is easier to install than Eclipse (which was always a bit of a nightmare imho with all the required Java installs it required). I also like how intuitive it is and that I can use it to do all sorts of other modern development. If there is a popular modern language out there, you can safely bet that VS Code supports it.
If you have not had a chance to check it out yet, I highly suggest you do so and just remember to keep an open mind.
Also, be aware that Salesforce Extensions for VS Code does not yet support everything that the Force.com IDE does. Like I said earlier, the original Force.com IDE is not going away, just the newer Beta version which included support for Salesforce DX and Lightning. It is going to take some time for the development team to get all the features that the Force.com IDE offers into Salesforce Extensions for VS Code.
But keep in mind, that VS Code is where they are headed, so if you have not yet checked out Visual Studio Code, now is the perfect time to do so. I think you will be pleasantly surprised and impressed with it.
And let me know what you think…
Sara Has No Limits 