Power Platform Developer Tools November update

We are glad to announce the release of our final 2022 deliverable, the November update for Power Platform CLI, Azure DevOps, and GitHub actions. Once again, this month’s update has some great new features available, and I am happy to share them with you.

Support for Managed Identities in Azure DevOps

This has by far been one of the most requested features. Support for Managed Identities in Azure DevOps. The Managed Identities support has to do with Azure DevOps pipelines, self-hosted agent pools. So before you get started in Azure DevOps, you need to go to Azure Portal and Create an Azure VM Scale Set

Figure 1: Script to create a VM agent pool

Assign a system managed or a user managed identity to the VM Agent pool. Notice the Object id, as this is needed later.

Figure 2: Created a system managed Identity for the VM Agent Pool

Now Let us go into Azure DevOps and go to <DevOps Organization -> settings -> Agent Pool and create a new agent pool mapped to Azure VM scale set

Figure 3: Assigning an Agent Pool in Azure DevOps

Add a new agent pool and map this pool to your VM scale set and give it a useful name.

For the maximum number of virtual machines option select 5 (keeping it small) and the number of agents on standby as 2 and proceed to create.

This will now create a new agent pool for you to use in your Azure DevOps pipeline.

Now once this is done, there is one more thing you need to do, create the service connection to use the managed identity for authentication.

Figure 4: Creating a managed identity service connection

Now we create the service connection to use the Managed identity.

For the URL parameter, provide the URL for the environment in question.

And then go to azure and make sure that the Appid for the managed environment has access to import solutions in the dev environment.

Remember the object id for the system managed identity this is where it is useful. You need to get the application ID for Power Platform.

Figure 5: Getting the Application ID for the Managed Identity

Now, add it to the environment as shown in this figure and give the app id the right role here in this case I have given it the System administrator role.

Figure 6: Adding the Managed Identity App id to the environment

Change your agent pool to the one you have created and make sure to install .NET core 6.x if you are using Linux agents in your VM pool when running the pipeline.

And the service connection in this case we have changed the service connection for the pipeline and executed the pipeline. Now you can successfully run an Azure DevOps Pipeline with Managed Identity. The wonderful thing about this feature is that when the VM scale group is removed the App identity does not have access to your resource. The best part about managed identities is that you do not have to worry about secrets and key rollover, those are just done as the secrets are managed by Azure and the organization policy you have set in place.

Note: Managed identities are not supported for GitHub actions, yet. If you need us to support the capability in GitHub actions, please let us know.

Assign groups to environments

No sooner than we added the ability to assign-user, we were asked to have the ability to assign an application user and when delivered on that, you asked us to provide the ability to assign user groups. In this update you can now assign groups to newly created environments. This is available in the command line, GitHub Actions and Azure DevOps.

Support for Power Platform Pipelines

We just recently announced the availability of Power Platform Pipelines, and now using the Power Platform CLI you can list and execute pipelines that are created in Power Platform Pipelines. The new verbs for this new noun are list for listing pipelines and deploy for deploying pipelines.

Virtual Agents

This noun was behind the feature flag for a long time, now it is finally here. We only have one verb for support and that is list. It will list out all the virtual agents in your environment.

As you can see, we have continued with our monthly cadence and we always hope to delight our users. Because we are heading into the holiday season, the December/January update will likely ship in February next year. Please try out these capabilities and give us feedback at the following location ISVFeedback@Microsoft.com or The PowerUsers community. Raise the issue and bugs at the following location in GitHub https://aka.ms/powerplatform-vscode.

Happy Holidays and Wish you all a Great New Year!