July 2019 updates for Microsoft PowerApps
With summer vacations and much of the team spending time with you in Atlanta at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit we don’t have as many features this month….but the features we shipped are amazing! For July the PowerApps team released over 9 new features and enhancements for making your application creation experience even more productive, fun and a special focus this month, enabling PowerApps development integration with your DevOps workstreams!
If you don’t want to wait for this blog post you can always can view a roll up of the upcoming features here: https://aka.ms/businessappsreleasenotes and more fine grained PowerApps weekly release information here: https://aka.ms/PAWeeklyReleaseNotes
If you don’t see a feature that you want in PowerApps please navigate to https://ideas.powerapps.com and if you are interested in having a hand in the development of PowerApps and want collaborate with the design team in shaping the future of the product, please sign up for our research panel at: https://aka.ms/BecomeAResearchParticipant
PowerApps Portals is now available for Public Preview
July 18th we announced that the public preview for PowerApps Portals is now open for everyone. Now all PowerApps makers can create powerful low-code and responsive portals which allow users external to their organizations to interact with data stored in Common Data Service.
PowerApps ISV Studio is now available for public preview
July 15 we announced public preview for PowerApps ISV Studio. This is a significant milestone for our partner ecosystem representing dedicated ISV focused engineering investments.
Naturally, these investments are designed to help ISVs be more productive on the platform, but equally importantly they are intended to help ensure we can better serve customers in collaboration with our ISV ecosystem allowing partners to build high quality apps and proactively manage and monitor the performance of these apps.
AppSource certification readiness of your solution
To make the AppSource certification process faster and more transparent, we announced the public preview of PowerApps Build Tools that includes an Azure DevOps Build task (PowerApps Checker task) to validate your app against the AppSource certification criteria. This means that you can validate your app and you can do it continuously as part of your Build process, thereby running the validation earlier in the lifecycle and closer to the developer where issues are much faster and cheaper to resolve. However, setting up a fully automated build process via Azure DevOps is just one of many options to assess the readiness of your app before submitting to AppSource for certification.
Achieve maximum canvas app productivity with right click and keyboard shortcuts
Updated the PowerApps design canvas to respond to right clicks to perform key actions such as Copy, Paste, Reorder and Align. Simply select a control, and right click using the mouse to open this menu. No worries for keyboard users, this same menu is also available in the tree view. Stay tuned for more inline quick property editing goodness coming soon to your right click mouse button.
Gateway Management On Power Platform Admin Center
As a gateway administrator you will now be able to see all data gateways(standard and personal mode) that you are admin of, manage gateway administrators and search on gateway cluster names and contact info
Canvas PowerApps using Common Data Service can easily share data with Azure AD Security Groups
Canvas PowerApps using Common Data Service can be shared with Azure AD Security Groups and data permissions for the group can be set in the PowerApps.com sharing experience. This experience dramatically reduces the overhead in sharing an app and preempts configuring data permissions on a per user basis. This saves substantial time for each app that is shared with tens, hundreds or thousands of users. Apps shared with many users, or a group of users that changes over time, should be shared with an Azure AD security group. You can learn more about creating an Azure security group here.
On-premises data gateway updates
The on-premises data gateway is now built using .NET 4.7.2 framework hence some of the operating systems we used to support may no longer be supported. More information about OS which will be supported here.
With the July 2019 version of the gateway, if you don’t have the .NET 4.7.2 framework or higher but are using a supported OS version, the gateway install will prompt the .Net framework install. Choosing not to install the .Net framework will fail the installation of the gateway.
Automate your application lifecycle management (ALM) with PowerApps Build Tools (Preview)
The PowerApps Build Tools preview is a collection of PowerApps specific Build Tasks for Azure DevOps. PowerApps Checker: This task enables you to run solution checks outside of the PowerApps Maker user experience in an automated manner. PowerApps Import Solution: No more manual imports. The import solution automatically imports your solution into a target environment. PowerApps Export Solution: As above, just the other way around. This task automatically exports your solution from a source environment. PowerApps Unpack Solution: This task takes a compressed solution file and decomposes it into multiple XML files so that these files can be more easily managed by your source control system. PowerApps Pack Solution: Packs your solution represented in source control into a solution.zip file that can be imported into your target environment.
Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2019 – session list quick reference
While not exactly a PowerApps feature adding as it covered all the upcoming features we are working on. The Microsoft Business Application Summit had a great lineup of sessions related to PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, Common Data Service and related technologies.
In addition to this blog and the Online content, a PowerApps canvas app version of this list is available in the Community Apps Gallery for easy viewing of the sessions and sharing it broadly with your colleagues.
