Power Platform Command Line and Power Platform Tools for Visual Studio Code June Update

There has been quite a bit of speculation about the different between the Standalone Power Platform CLI (pac cli) and Power Platform Tools for VS Code. We hope that this post will help clear some of the confusion and have some important points for you to note:

• The standalone Power Platform CLI and the Power Platform CLI available as part of Power Platform Tools for VS Code extension are the same.
• They offer the same capabilities, with the exception that the Power Platform VS Code extension runs in the context of the IDE in this case and gets updated automatically as newer versions of the extension is available.
• The standalone Power Platform CLI works on Windows, whereas Power Platform Tools for VS Code also runs on macOS, Windows.

We would encourage folks to use the Power Platform Tools for VS Code over the standalone Power Platform CLI, as it lines better with some of the developer inner-loop functions

Having said all that, I would like to announce our June update of the Standalone Power Platform CLI and the Power Platform Tools for VSCode  (Yes, we know it is July already)

• pac pcf init: now does npm install to get a new PCF project fully initialized. This was a long ask from the PCF development community, to improve this experience, now there is no need to do a separate npm install after initializing a folder for a pcf project.

• pac paportal: commands have been improved as well.
  • Upload of portal data happens in parallel, this allows portal applications to be uploaded faster, so it is a performance improvement.
  • Improved error reporting during parallel execution and when encountering YAML errors.
• pac solution check: now allows you to check your solution before importing the solution to your environment, so errors in the apps can be caught early in the development cycle.

• pac solution version: now allows users to increment the versioning number based on the versioning strategy, this capability is to better facilitate release management practices for an organization. Here is an example of before and after running the pac solution version command.

Before:

And after:

We are excited with the number of changes we are bringing in this update, so please go check it out and do reach out to us to provide  feedback  @ ISVFeedback@microsoft.com or in the Powerusers community