Power platform Developer tools May Refresh

We are delighted to announce the release of our new update (Version: 1.16.5+gba7d6a4) for the Power Platform Command line. This May refresh comes with capabilities ranging from support for single sign-on to even simple things like showing whether solutions are managed or unmanaged when listing out the solutions. So, without further ado, let us get into the details.

Single Sign-on (Early Capability)

In this new update, when you don’t provide a URL, it creates a universal single sign on authentication profile and authenticates you to your default organization. This is an early single sign-on capability, we plan to improve on it further in the upcoming updates. So, when you use the `pac auth create` command and not provide anything else or `pac auth create -dc` without additional parameters, it will create a new authentication type called universal.

You can still authenticate to other dataverse environments, using the –url parameter. But we would really like to get your feedback on this new single sign-on capability. Please let us know what you think.

Support for China Sovereign Cloud

From PAC CLI we have added support for Azure China Sovereign cloud, this was a long ask from our China based customers and now we can use Power Platform command line capabilities to the China cloud as well. This also means GitHub actions are also supported in the China Sovereign cloud region and eventually we will also support Azure DevOps actions. Here is an example of how you if the China Cloud is supported

Support for Packages that hold .cab files

We introduced a bunch of new changes to the `pac package` command in the last update, As in now packages can also be build just like a solution, except in packages I can bundle multiple solutions and deploy. Now can you deploy packages that *.cab files

Showing if solutions are managed or not on the command line

One of the most frequently asked features by our user community by far. We now have the ability at the command line to know if a solution is managed or unmanaged. In the past the only way a user would know if a solution was managed or unmanaged was when they did an export and the export error out saying the solution was managed. Now when you do a `pac solution list`, you get a column identifying whether the solution is managed or unmanaged.

As you can see we have been adding more capabilities to the CLI. Our team has been actively working on making our Azure DevOps tasks to also be based on the Power Platform CLI, instead of the current PowerShell modules. We will be pushing out that update in early July, and in most cases those that are using your existing Azure DevOps pipelines should not notice any difference. The benefit of this work is that both GitHub actions and Azure DevOps tasks will be powered by the same engine and be cross platform.

As always, we are excited to bring these capabilities to you. If you have additional feedback please reach out to us via the following forums ISVFeedback@Microsoft.com or The PowerUsers community. Raise the issue and bugs at the following location in GitHub https://aka.ms/powerplatform-vscode