#salesforcedx

Salesforce Dx ('SFDX') is a suite of tools aimed at improving the experience of traditional developers building on the platform. Let's see what the different types of Salesforce DX Tools are- 

Salesforce DX Tools

The Ant-based Force.com migration tool was replaced by the Salesforce command-line interface (CLI). It includes all of Ant's functionality and instructions for pushing and retrieving metadata to and from orgs, converting metadata to SFDX format, and controlling additional DX features. If you're a developer, the Salesforce CLI will put the power of DX at your fingertips.

Salesforce also published Visual Studio Code extensions that make the lightweight, extensible code editor a suitable IDE for working with DX, thereby replacing the Eclipse-based Force.com IDE, which has since been retired. Salesforce continues to improve its IDE tooling, with plans to deliver Code Builder, a web-based development environment.

Because there is no separation of concerns, packaging your metadata prevents having an unstructured org, which can be more difficult to manage and modify. Before DX, Salesforce already allowed teams to package metadata into logical units that could be deployed in orgs, but DX introduced second-generation packaging (2GP) with several improvements above 1GP.

The most significant difference is that 2GP makes version control, rather than a packaging organization, the source of truth for package metadata. Unlocked packages are another name for these packages. If your team is going down the packaging route, use unlocked packages to ensure a best-practice DevOps workflow with version control.

Scratch organizations were a DX innovation: temporary organizations that can be created as a new environment when starting 'from scratch' (thus the name), then destroyed or allowed to expire. Scratch orgs have a total lifespan of 30 days, but you can choose an even shorter lifespan; you can even choose the shape of the org and the functionality it has enabled when creating a new one. It would be best to allow a permanent org, usually Production, as a DevHub to establish and administer scratch orgs. Scratch orgs can be formed within a DevOps solution's UI or via the CLI.

Salesforce DX also released a new metadata format. When you move to DX format, large, complicated metadata like custom objects and translations are broken down into more manageable subcomponents. This change makes it much easier for developers to work with files in their IDE.

The new metadata format also benefits the entire team by lowering the possibility of merging conflicts. When developers and administrators make changes to the same files, they frequently encounter merge conflicts that Git cannot resolve. By separating the metadata into smaller, independent files, teammates are more likely to work in various files and have fewer merge conflicts to address.

Among the enhancements to Salesforce's APIs, the Dependency API is yet another DX feature that assists teams in understanding and managing the complexities of orgs with numerous dependencies across metadata. The Dependency API is still in beta; however, it may be used to find out which components reference others and vice versa.