Announcing the public preview of canvas components and Power Apps component framework

Today, the Power Apps team is excited to announce the public preview for two core canvas apps UI extensibility areas – Canvas components and Power Apps component framework. Both these features contribute directly towards Power Apps mission – Empower every developer to do more.

Low code/no code canvas component creation augmented with power and flexibility of modern web technologies for professional developers offers real no-cliff experience to empower tech intensity in our customers and partners. Inline with our direction of having one unified component ecosystem this release is a significant milestone towards fading those boundaries.

Canvas components enables low code makers to create or procure custom components with more advanced capabilities and better scenario fit than what is available out of the box. Additionally these components can easily be reused across multiple screens and applications. This feature was announced as experimental preview earlier last year and was very well received . You can find some amazing downloadable canvas components at canvas components sample gallery. With the public preview today we are adding Component Library support , which enables centralized component creation, sharing and reuse across multiple applications. You can find more details in component library documentation.

Power Apps components framework on canvas apps experimental release was announced in September 2019 and it introduced a way for professional developers to add reusable field type code components. With the public preview today we are adding support for data set components types. These custom data set components can be configured against any canvas data set like SQL, Microsoft Excel and so on and are not restricted to just the Common Data Service.  Please note that the framework is already generally available for model apps. Microsoft Power Apps CLI is the tool to build, test and  upload these components to canvas apps.  Data set component support enables much richer scenarios like maps, calendars and Kanban board. With more than 1700 third party controls in production and hundreds open sourced via community, you can be sure to find one which either fits your need or provides a excellent starting template. You can find more information on the community resources here.

We are looking forward to many more components as we march towards GA.

Please use community forums and ideas portal for any bugs, feedback and suggestions. Our product engineering actively monitors these and it will also help us prioritize any critical GA impacting issues.

Cheers,

Hemant Gaur