General Availability of Power Platform Tools for Visual Studio Code and February Refresh for Power Platform CLI

With great delight, we are announcing the general availability of Power Platform Tools for Visual Studio Code in addition to our monthly Power Platform CLI refresh. This new capability, that we are announcing, beyond just the terminal interface for the Power Platform CLI in Visual Studio code, we have added some graphical elements, that lets us take advantage of the real estate that Visual Studio Code offers.

New capabilities

New UI capabilities

One of the big differences that you will notice right away is when the extension is installed, you will now see a Power Platform Icon on the Activity bar in Visual Studio Code.

Unlike during the preview, where the only way to know if the extension was installed, one would have to launch the terminal interface in Visual Studio code and then run the pac command. Now there is a visual element to let you know that the extension is installed. Clicking on this icon launches the side bar that shows the stored authentication profiles and the list of environments and solutions within those environments.

Install apps from AppSource: This is a preview capability that we are launching as public preview with a broader announcement coming in a few weeks. This command allows you to install applications available from AppSource which are often needed as a prerequisite when preparing new development environments. For this preview we have implemented a basic capability to install such applications via command line.

You can also install multiple applications by putting the list applications in JSON file and providing the path to the JSON file to the pac application install command

Solution versions again

Updating the solution version for solutions that are already imported into Dataverse. In case you did not follow a versioning paradigm properly from the outset, you now have the ability to set the right version. For example, here the version online is v1.0.0.0, and we realize we need to change the version to reflect the proper changes based on your change management rules. You can use pac solution online-version.

Before pac solution online-version:

Apply the pac solution online-version command:

Version has now changed:

All these capabilities are available, on Windows, macOS, and Linux. We are also making the source code repository of the extension available via GitHub as read only.

Resources

As always, we are delighted to bring these capabilities to you and as always, we continue to appreciate the feedback thus far and will continue to do so. Please provide your feedback at the following forums. ISVFeedback@Microsoft.com or The PowerUsers community and raise issues at https://aka.ms/powerplatform-vscode

One more thing: If you are starting out to try this capability, may we suggest that you try out our new lab to try to the experience https://aka.ms/powerplatform-vscode-lab