Microsoft Corporation maintains Visual Studio Code, one of the most popular open source code editors. Visual Studio Code is widely used nowadays for writing code. It is highly extensible, and there are a lot of contributors that create useful extensions for it to give this editor superpower. It’s not a gag; you can speed up your development with these tools and enhance your project contribution.

Here is my top 10 extension that you should try in VS Code that a Salesforce developer should use in 2022.

GitLens

The GitLens extension combines the powers of Git with VS Code that allows you to visualize code authorship via Git. GitLens helps you better understand code, so you can learn who, why, and when code was changed. It also allows you to explore the history and evolution of a codebase.

Here are just some of the features that GitLens provides:

• Effortless revision navigation (backward and forwards) through the history of a file
• A current line blame annotation at the end of the line shows the commit
• A status bar blame annotation for the commit and author who last modified the current line

Prettier – Code Formatter

The Prettier extension is a formatter that helps to keep code style consistent. It enforces a consistent style by parsing your code and re-printing it with rules that consider the maximum line length, wrapping code when necessary.

This extension works with the following technologies: JavaScript, TypeScript, Java, JSON, CSS, HTML, Vue, Angular, Markdown, YAML, and more.

Better Comments

Better Comments is an extension used for writing human-friendly comments in your code, which is helpful for you and your teammates to read the code. 

With this VS Code extension, you can use the following characters after a double forward slash // to add easier commenting:

• * for highlighted text
• ! for errors and warnings
• ? for queries and questions
• // for strikethrough
• TODO for to-dos

Apex PMD

Apex PMD allows developers to run Apex Static Analysis directly in VS Code on Apex, VisualForce & other XML metadata files. Current actions Supported by Apex PMD:

• Run analysis on file open
• Run analysis on file save
• Run analysis on file change (new!)
• Run analysis on entire workspace
• Run analysis on single file
• Ability to define your own ruleset

Apex Log Analyser

An analyzer for Salesforce debug logs aimed at making performance analysis much easier and quicker. You may also find it useful to quickly understand how your code is executing.

The main view provides a flame graph for visualizing code execution:

Hovering over an element provides information on the item. If you click on an item, it will take you to the call navigatable stack view. Other views show a sorted list of the methods invoked and the SOQL operations performed.

Salesforce Package.xml Generator

This extension provides a User Interface to choose metadata components for the Package.xml for development against sandboxes or Developer orgs (Org Development Model with VS Code). This is similar to the Eclipse Force.com IDE Add/Remove Metadata Components option.

ESLint

The ESLint extension serves as a code validator. It runs through your code to check for syntax errors, underlines them, and suggests possible solutions to fix and improve them. The ESLint extension also has many configurations to improve the code integrity, such as rules and styles.

SOQL – Provides code-editing features for SOQL

SOQL Builder enables you to build a SOQL query via a form-based visual editor interactively, view the query as you build, and save the output to a .csv or .json file.

Salesforce Documenter

Salesforce Documenter aims to facilitate properly structured code documentation for Salesforce-related files by automating related tasks such as generating & maintaining File and Method headers. SFDoc can be adopted as a project-wide and/or team-wide standard in an effort to encourage and eventually enforce proper code documenting.

Code becomes easier to understand, maintain, and evolve through these means.

Apex Replay Debugger

Apex Replay Debugger simulates a live debugging session using a debug log that is a recording of all interactions in a transaction. You no longer need to parse through thousands of log lines manually. Instead, Apex Replay Debugger presents the logged information similarly to an interactive debugger, so you can debug your Apex code. The debugging process is a repetition of editing your Apex code, pushing or deploying the code to your org, reproducing the buggy scenario, downloading the resulting debug log, and launching Apex Replay Debugger with that debug log.

Conclusion

With the right tools, high productivity and accuracy can be achieved in our everyday development life. Above, I’ve mentioned 10 Visual Studio Code Extensions that can boost one’s performance, speed, and accuracy over time.