Announcing general availability of Solution Checker

Today we have reached a key milestone, and we are happy to announce the general availability of Solution Checker.  Since December, when the PowerApps team rolled out the Solution Checker feature into Public preview, we have seen a great uptake in usage with 100’s of customers installing the checker, inspecting their code, and fixing key performance and reliability issues in their implementations.  We’ve also observed some awesome returns, with customers who are checking and actively resolving issues getting up to 20% performance increases on their Form loads. So, get checking your solutions today and see what you can find!

 

We thank all of our preview customers for their invaluable feedback over the last few months. One of the most common pieces of feedback that we received was around the need to install the solution in environments. We received questions such as “Why can’t it just be there?”, “Every time I build a new environment, I need to install the checker again, why?”  Well, along with this announcement, we are happy to let you know that installing the solution in your environments will no longer be required. Every new and existing CDS for Apps environment will now have the solution installed automatically. Over the next week, we will be working to enable this in all World-wide geographies.

 

What else is new?

While the PowerApps checker team have being busy preparing for GA, we have also released some important new enhancements over the last couple of months.

 

Viewing of check results on-line

You can now easily view the results of the check directly online without having to download the results. You can group the result by Issue, Location or Severity. Filter and search on various fields and see the recommended fixes and locations of issues identified.

 

Check your solution during export

During export of a solution, you will be reminded to check for issues if you have not already completed this, or you will see the number of issues identified in your solution from the last check completed. We recommend you review these issues prior to completing your export and moving your solutions to other environments.

 

Full localization support

All check results are now localized, and the result downloads are available in the languages supported in your CDS for Apps environment.

New rule additions

We are constantly looking to improve and introduce new best practice rules to our checks. Recent rule additions can be viewed below.

Solution component	Rule name	Rule description
Web resources	web-remove-debug-script	Avoid including debug script in non-development environments
Web resources	web-use-strict-mode	Use strict mode when possible
Web resources	web-use-strict-equality-operators	Use strict equality operators
Web resources	web-avoid-eval	Do not use the ‘eval’ function or its functional equivalents
Plug-in or workflow activity	il-use-autonumber-feature	Use the auto number feature instead a custom auto numbering solution
Plug-in or workflow activity	il-avoid-parallel-plugin	The usage of parallel patterns should be avoided within plug-ins
Plug-in or workflow activity	il-avoid-lock-plugin	Avoid lock of static members in plug-ins
Plug-in or workflow activity	meta-avoid-retrievemultiple-annotation	Avoid registering a plug-in on RetrieveMultiple of annotation

 

Solution Health Hub

The Solution Health Hub app extends PowerApps Checker helping to ensure the healthy state of an organization. In contrast to PowerApps Checker rules which review static artifacts, Solution Health Hub rules run within an instance to validate the configuration of the environment which may change over time through natural system operations. Along with rules, fixes can be included. It also allows ISVs and customers to provide their own set of rules. Additional documentation on how to create your own rules set will be published soon.

 

What’s next?

We know a lot of our customers have automated build and release pipelines, and a common ask is to enable direct API integration to the check service from their CI/CD processes. Soon we will be releasing a sample set of PowerShell scripts that will demonstrate how to integrate with the service! Stay tuned for this announcement in the coming weeks.