Power Platform Developer Tools: November Refresh

Right before the holidays, we are happy to announce the release of our November refresh for the Power Platform CLI and other great news from the Pro Developer tools team. In addition, we have some good news as well. So let us start with that!

Deployment settings support for connection references is now Generally Available

Earlier in August, this year, we had announced Public Preview for connection references and environment-variable support. I am happy to announce that the capability, based on popular demand, is now Generally Available. So, we are looking forward to hearing your feedback on the matter.

What is new in Power Platform CLI 1.10.4?

As you are aware that Power Platform CLI is multi-platform, we were informed of an interactive login issue on Linux and macOS, which has now been fixed in the latest update.

In addition, we announced support for Windows Services for Linux and GitHub Codespaces in Preview capacity at Microsoft Ignite this year. CodeSpaces in GitHub, allow users to not require to clone the repository and work with their GitHub Repository directly within the GitHub Web interface. We can’t wait for you to try this capability out.

We also fixed the “non recoverable error” issue with Canvas pack. As a reminder both the Canvas pack and unpack are still preview capabilities, but we are making changes and fixes based on your feedback.

We have also introduced a couple of new commands, and they are:

pac solution delete — solution-name <name of solution to delete>

pac solution online-version –solution-name <name of solution> –solution-version <value of the version>

pac solution delete finally allows users of the command line to delete the solution from the command line interface or Visual Studio Code extension, just like within Studio interface.

pac solution online-version now allows users to set version numbers based on their version management strategies. We provided this capability, because if in case users do not set their versioning strategy with pac solution version, they have this fall-back capability to increment the versioning number post import. This one of many use cases for the online-version command under pac solution.

Figure 1: Example of how pac solution online-version works

pac admin comment now takes both the environment url or the environment id with a new flag called –environment, this will allow us to deprecate –url and –environmentid flag and simplify the overall interaction for the user and for scripting.

Pac solution unpack in the earlier versions would delete the solution zip file without giving the user the option to preserve the solution zip-file. We changed the default behavior to not delete the zipfile and given a new parameter –AlllowDeletes. Only when then AllowDeletes flag is provided, that is when the solution zipfile will be deleted by solution unpack command.

And there are many more of such capabilities to explore within the November refresh. You can download the standalone CLI or Visual Studio Code extension based on the instructions from the following url: Microsoft Power Platform CLI – Power Apps | Microsoft Docs

 

I know 2021 has been a challenging year, we can’t thank you enough for your support, and as always please provide your feedback at ISVFeedback@Microsoft.com or in the Powerusers community.

Happy Holidays everyone!!