Introduction
After rather long wait for those of us that were keen to get our hands on it, Salesforce Code Builder went into open beta on July 13th 2022. I was particularly interested in this as I'd been on the beta of the underlying technology - Visual Studio Codespaces back in 2020 and the beta of Github Codespaces in 2021. I couldn't get on the Code Builder pilot, in spite of twisting every Salesforce arm I knew of, so I had to replicate as best I could using those. If you are interested in seeing my attempts at this, check out this video on the London Salesforce Developers' Youtube channel - and why not subscribe while you are there? If you prefer the written word, check out my blog post on this topic.
Joining the Open Beta
The Salesforce blog post makes it sound like you just follow some instructions and you are in - that's not quite the case as you join a waitlist. I never heard back after joining, but when I checked the org I was using for the beta, I found I was good to go, so my advice is check early and often if you can create you environment.
The rest of it is pretty self-service - you install a managed package, authorise some third party sites and assign yourself the Code Builder permission set. Then you try to create an environment and find out you need to join a waitlist as mentioned above, so you find something else to do for a day or two.
The managed package did complain that it didn't support my version of Salesforce, which is a developer edition, but thus far I haven't seen any issues.
Connecting to Salesforce
When I was attempting to replicate Code Builder using Codespaces, this required setting up JWT authentication for each Salesforce org I wanted to use. While this is more repetitive than difficult, it quickly becomes boring and was probably the main reason I didn't go a lot further.
With the advent of the Code Builder beta, I could forget all about that side of things - when I created my environment I was asked to login to the org that I wanted to work in, and connecting to another org is also very straightforward, although it did take me a few goes to get it to stop defaulting to my Code Builder beta org.
The Developer Experience
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| VS Code in the browser |
It's still early days for me with the beta, but the developer experience thus far is pretty good. I connected up my dev hub, created a scratch org, pushed the code that I'm testing and everything went smoothly. There is a wrinkle around creating new Lightning Web Components, in that I get error output that the command failed to run, even though the component did get created. I can push it to a scratch org which means it's being picked up by the tracking, so I'm guessing it's an issue for the extension talking to the CLI in this architecture.
As Code Builder really is a virtual machine in the cloud, in this case AWS, it will be costing real money to provide workspaces, so the beta is limited to 20 hours over 30 days. This sounds like quite a lot of time for essentially a side gig, but try not to get distracted - I lost the best part of 30 minutes of my alloted time after opening the workspace and then getting caught up in something elsewhere. Shut it down when you aren't using it!