Key Benefits:

• Unified Control Styling: Virtual controls with Fluent ensure consistent styling across multiple apps and app types.
• Improved Performance: By eliminating the need for isolated React trees and smaller control bundle.
• Simplified Development: The need to include React or Fluent libraries in individual component bundles is removed, streamlining the development process.

Note that code components created earlier via preview are backward compatible and will continue to work. Please rebuild them using the latest version of PAC tooling so that they are ready for future platform library upgrades.

You can find more details about this feature including supported platform library versions in our documentation for React controls & platform libraries. Please use Power Apps Pro Dev forum for any input or questions.

The post React and Fluent based virtual code components are now generally available appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

An improved static analysis made this speed up possible

While you edit or play your app in Studio, a continuous analysis of app elements and their interactions is happening in the background. This lets Studio determine the types of all the variables and collections in your app, maintain a real time dependency graph of relationships between different expressions, and keep track of what columns your app uses from every data source. For example, this allows us to know that if you change an expression `Set(x, 5)` to `Set(x, {Lorem: “Ipsum”})` that the type of `x` is now a record instead of a number, and any references in your app to `x + 1` will therefore be marked as erroneous.  

What’s New? 

• Performance Boost: The New Analysis Engine optimizes how we approach that analysis, ensuring that we can get it started faster when you load your app in Studio, and that we keep things up to date quicker while you edit. The new analysis algorithm scales linearly with app size, eliminating complex cases that previously caused performance issues. Complex Canvas apps that previously took minutes to load should now load much faster. 
  
  While this performance boost will be most noticeable for the largest apps that you build, we see improvements across the board when switching to the New Analysis Engine.
  
  Note: These improvements have no impact on app run time performance of a published app.
  
  Here are some statistics from real apps showcasing the performance improvement on app load for existing analysis and new analysis: 
  

• Accuracy: The New Analysis Engine is not only faster but also more accurate. It enables more accurate determination of variable and collection types. When analyzing field usage (Explicit Column Selection), the New Analysis Engine reliably identifies the columns used in your app, addressing several long-standing bugs and enhancing Data Source call performance in published apps. Additionally, it facilitated the development of the User Defined Functions feature, which would not have been feasible with the previous engine.

• Preview No More: Thanks to your valuable feedback during the experimental and preview phases, we’ve fine-tuned the engine. It’s now ready for prime time!
  

What You Need to Do 

• New Apps: For all new apps you create, the New Analysis Engine will be turned on by default. Enjoy the improved performance right from the start! 
• Existing Apps: If you have existing apps, we recommend enabling the New Analysis Engine. Here’s how:
  • Open your app in Studio. 
  • Go to Settings. 
  • Go to Updates. 
  • Look for the “New Analysis Engine” toggle on the New tab. 
  • Turn it on. 
  • Test your app thoroughly to ensure everything works as expected. 
    

Important Note: Starting February 2025, all Canvas apps will be migrated to use new analysis engine. We recommend testing your canvas apps with the New Analysis Engine to ensure they function as expected prior to migration.

A Word of Caution

While we’re confident in the New Analysis Engine’s capabilities, please refrain from using it for existing apps in production environments until you’ve thoroughly tested your app. Subtle behavior differences may arise, and we appreciate your vigilance. 

Your Feedback Matters

As always, your feedback is invaluable. Let us know how the New Analysis Engine performs for you. Share your experiences, report any issues, and help us fine-tune this feature further on the community forum. 

Thank you for being part of our Canvas app community! Together, we’re making app development smoother, faster, and more delightful.

Happy app building! 

The post New Analysis Engine Now Generally Available!  appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Every organization’s journey to adopt Microsoft Power Platform is unique. A tenant environment strategy lays the foundation to help accelerate usage in a manageable and secure fashion. An effective environment strategy is crucial for maintaining control, ensuring security, and maximizing efficiency. Our white paper delves into the key components of such a strategy, offering actionable insights and best practices for organizations of all sizes. This white paper shows you how to align your Power Platform tenant environment strategy with the product capabilities and vision and how to best use the latest features of the platform to implement a strategy that can allow your adoption of Power Platform to reach enterprise scale.

Key highlights of the white paper 

1. Understanding Environment Types: Learn about the different types of environments available in Power Platform, including Production, Sandbox, and Developer environments, and how to use them effectively.
2. Governance and Compliance: Discover best practices for establishing governance policies, ensuring compliance with industry standards, and maintaining data security across all environments.
3. Environment Lifecycle Management: Explore strategies for managing the lifecycle of your environments, from creation to decommissioning, to ensure they remain efficient and relevant.
4. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Policies: Understand the importance of DLP policies in protecting sensitive information and how to implement them within your Power Platform environments.
5. Monitoring and Maintenance: Gain insights into monitoring the health and performance of your environments and learn about maintenance tasks that keep your solutions running smoothly.
6. Scaling and Performance Optimization: Find out how to scale your environments to meet growing demands and optimize performance for better user experiences.

Access the white paper on Microsoft Learn and start building a robust environment strategy that aligns with your organization’s goals and needs.

Join the Conversation

We invite you to explore the white paper and share your thoughts with us. How has Power Platform transformed your business? What challenges have you faced in managing your environments? Reach out to us at powerpnp@microsoft.com.

The post Develop a tenant environment strategy to adopt Power Platform at scale appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Power Platform Well-Architected is based on Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework and aligns seamlessly with Azure WAF.

What is Power Platform Well-Architected?

Power Platform Well-Architected is a set of best practices and guidance aimed at helping you design, implement, and maintain robust application workloads using Power Platform, aligned with five pillars: Reliability, Security, Operational Excellence, Performance Efficiency, and Experience Optimization. Power Platform Well-Architected focuses on key architectural considerations, providing a structured approach to building workloads that not only meet current business needs but are also scalable and flexible enough to adapt to future challenges.

Power Platform Well-Architected provides an assessment tool, comprising questions that are based on the key recommendations provided in the pillars. Completing the assessment provides you with recommendations and corresponding links to the specific guidance that can help you improve your workload’s design.

Benefits and features

Some of the key features and benefits of Power Platform Well-Architected include:

1. Guidance aligned with pillars and principles: Power Platform Well-Architected is built on a set of Pillars and Principles that form the foundation of well-architected applications. By starting with these Pillars and aligning your design choices with the established Principles, you can ensure that your applications are built on a solid and sustainable foundation.
2. Design review checklists: To help guide you on your journey to well-architected workloads, Power Platform Well-Architected includes detailed design review checklists. These checklists cover a wide range of considerations, from performance and scalability to security and user experience, ensuring that no critical aspect of your workload design is overlooked.
3. Recommendation guides and tradeoffs: Building modern applications often involves making tradeoffs between different architectural choices. Power Platform Well-Architected provides recommendation guides and tradeoffs that offer insights into the pros and cons of various design options, helping you make informed decisions that align with your business goals and technical requirements.
4. Adaptability for future needs: One of the core strengths of Power Platform Well-Architected is its focus on adaptability. The guidance and best practices are designed to help you create applications that can evolve with your business, accommodating new requirements and the evolving technological landscape

Get started on your journey to well-architected modern application workloads with Power Platform Well-Architected on Microsoft Learn.

The post Announcing Power Platform Well-Architected appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

For more details, you can refer to our documentation @ https://aka.ms/PowerAdvisorDocs. You can bookmark the link https://aka.ms/PowerAdvisor, to access the Power Platform Advisor.

During the preview, we observed hundreds of customers actively using Advisor to optimize thousands of apps. We’ve also got some fantastic feedback during our preview phase. Here are a couple of quotes from our customers:

“At Provoke Solutions, we’re thrilled about the transformative impact of the Power Platform Advisor offering. This advancement marks a significant leap, enabling our global customer base to manage and govern the Power Platform on an unprecedented scale. With the introduction of the automation options and recommendations, we’re not just boosting efficiency; we’re enabling a Power Platform administrator to deliver on the promise of delivering a well governed environment to their organization. The Advisor is a testament to the potential of innovative technology to redefine platform management and governance, promising to be a game changer for our customers.”

– Brendon Ford, COO, Provoke Solutions

“At Chemours, the advisor is an essential component in the Microsoft Power Platform admin center for our governance processes. It helps us to quickly identify any orphaned applications, that can be business-critical and assign new owners to mitigate business process impact. The advisor feature, offers a comprehensive solution for admins to efficiently manage governance and security, ensuring data and applications are safeguarded at all times. We’re thrilled with the investment and look forward to the future, with advisor, and making advisor available in all products of the Power Platform.”

– Akash Patel, Business Application Governance and Innovator, The Chemours Company

These quotes highlight the impact Power Platform Advisor has had in optimizing their Power Platform tenant and enhancing their overall governance experience.

What’s Next?

As we move forward, Power Platform and Environment admins should expect several additional recommendations coming to the Advisor. We are continuously working to improve and expand the capabilities of Power Platform Advisor based on your feedback and needs.

We Value Your Feedback

Your feedback is invaluable to us. As you start using Power Platform Advisor, we encourage you to share your thoughts and experiences. Your insights will help us enhance this feature and better serve your governance needs. Thank you for your continued support and happy optimizing with Power Platform Advisor!

The post Power Platform Advisor is generally available appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

With these updates, we’re excited to announce the general availability of delegated deployments for pipelines in Power Platform!

Additionally, admins can now enable pipelines for multi-geo support, making it easy to centrally administer global deployments within a single management plane.

Build

As makers develop, customizations are automatically saved to their preferred solution (no need to understand or navigate to solutions). This avoids downstream deployment issues, painful debugging steps, and other common mishaps.

 When authoring solution cloud flows, drafts and versioning provides a history for each published version of the flow. Makers can view the version history, restore prior versions, and save draft changes without publishing them live – even if the flow has errors! Then, the flow can be published when they are ready to run the flow. Please leave your drafts and versioning comments and feedback here.

Test

Admins can improve quality by ensuring solution checker runs on every deployment, and configure issue tolerance levels for different environments. Pipelines can be extended to run additional code and security scanning tools, or automated tests by integrating your source control systems. Functional user acceptance testing is also recommended after deployment to test environments.

We recommend starting with pipelines in Power Platform and using extensions if you need to integrate more advanced workloads running in Azure DevOps, GitHub, etc. Similarly, if taking dependencies on test automation, we recommend Test Engine.

Release

Makers are guided to deploy at the right time. For example, when manually exporting and importing solutions or blocked by sharing limits.

Instead, sharing is requested during deployment to target environments, like production, where it’s appropriate to share broadly. Admins simply need to approve the combined deployment and sharing request, and the rest happens automatically. Sharing is rolling out for canvas apps and soon for cloud flows and security roles.

Makers can also update existing environment variables and connection references in pipelines and solution import. Combined, these capabilities protect production assets with least privileged access, reduce admin burden, and train makers to submit all updates via your organization’s change management process. If admins haven’t configured pipelines and governance policies, makers are empowered to create their own pipeline to environments (they must already have access to manually import solutions. Pipelines doesn’t escalate permissions). Admins can apply additional governance controls and manage security within the default host and custom hosts. There’s a new entry point within the solution experience to Manage pipelines and a Security Teams section in the app to manage pipelines access. Note: we currently recommend using a custom pipelines host when more advanced control is desired.

 

Why pipelines vs manual export/import? Unlike manual export/import, pipelines stores backups for every version of every solution deployed, and admin accessible audit logs describing who, what, when, where, and why (AI provided). Pipelines deployments enjoy higher success rates by pre-validating solutions against target environments and sequencing multiple deployments to avoid conflicts. 

 

Solution simplification remains an ongoing effort. Recent improvements include streamlined dependency management and automatic conversion of unmanaged to managed solution objects (see moving from unmanaged to managed solutions).

 

What if breaking changes are inadvertently deployed? Now makers and admins can now re-deploy prior solution versions using pipelines or developer tooling.

 

Documentation

• ALM Guide
• Pipelines in Power Platform
• Managed environments
• Power Platform Developer tools
   

The post April 2024 ALM blog: What’s new and what it means for you appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This highly anticipated feature provides a secure layer of protection for fixed credential connections such as SQL Server basic auth (i.e., connection string username and password.)  All new apps now use this feature.  Older apps must be converted to use this feature (if not already converted) and previously shared connections unshared.

With this new feature, connections are no longer shared with other makers. Instead, the app now interacts with a connection proxy object that only allows queries from the app and also only allows the types of queries that are in the app.  The most prominent use of implicitly shared connections is for SQL Server. Admins can use a report available in the COE toolkit to find apps that do not use this feature.      

For more information, see the article on Secure Implicit Connections. 

The post General availability of Secure Implicit Connections appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We recently published a new whitepaper, “Application modernization with Power Platform”, that explores the benefits, strategies, and best practices of modernizing applications with Microsoft Power Platform. The whitepaper provides insights and guidance on how the Microsoft low-code platform can help you ensure the success of your application modernization efforts as part of your organization’s digital transformation.

The whitepaper covers a breadth of topics of interest to CIOs, architects, and solution implementers. Some of the topics covered in the whitepaper include:

• Key benefits of Power Platform for modernizing applications, including reducing technical debt, enhancing security and compliance, lowering costs, and boosting productivity, just to name a few
• Evaluating and prioritizing opportunities to modernize apps with low-code solutions
• Organizing and upskilling teams
• Extensibility options
• Low-code modernization architecture scenarios
• And much more!

The guidance in the whitepaper is based on real-world customer experiences with application modernization using Power Platform and the expertise of Microsoft solution architects.

Ensure the success of your application modernization journey with low-code by downloading the whitepaper from Microsoft Learn.

The post Application modernization with Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

With Power Platform Advisor, you can:

• Get proactive, personalized best practices recommendations.
• Improve the overall health of your Power Platform tenant.
• Take inline actions or automate actions using cloud flows.

With this public preview, recommendations are initially focused on Security and Operational Efficiency. Advisor makes it easy to clean up unused apps, lock down overshared apps, and add owners to abandoned apps. You can view these recommendations, see the individual resources involved, and evaluate and take inline actions.

Power Platform Advisor offers several capabilities:

• Top Recommendations visible on the Power Platform admin center homepage and in the Advisor page that can be accessed from the left navigation menu.
• Actionable Recommendations for impacted apps and resources.
• Automated Actions using cloud flows extensibility and the new Power Platform Admin v2 connector (currently in preview).
• Weekly Focus Card in Teams highlighting the top 2 recommendations based on impact.
• Share Recommendations feature for team collaboration or to delegate actions.

“At Lumen Technologies, we have found that using advisor in Microsoft Power Platform admin center is essential for our maintenance and governance. It enables us to quickly re-assign apps that have no owner or quarantine apps that are not in compliance. When used in conjunction with the Center of Excellence Starter Kit, advisor completes the picture. We are excited about the investment and the future how with advisor we can better protect and ensure the safety of our data and apps.” –

Andrew Gaskins, Principal Solution Architect, Lumen Technologies

Power Platform Advisor is accessible to all tenant admins in the Power Platform admin center and customers with at least one Managed environment in their tenant via https://aka.ms/PowerAdvisor. It’s currently being rolled out to all the tenants and will be available in all tenants by the end of this month. Tenant analytics should be enabled in your tenant for Power Platform Advisor to work, and it might take up to 3 days for the recommendations to show up once the tenant analytics is enabled.

Learn more at https://aka.ms/PowerAdvisorDocs.

We are just starting the journey with Power Platform Advisor and have many more recommendations and actions lined up over the coming months. We are eager to see how you will use Advisor to optimize your Power Platform deployments. Your feedback is invaluable to us, so please don’t hesitate to share your thoughts and experiences.

The post Introducing Power Platform Advisor appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

With recent updates, makers can create solution-aware cards for Power Apps for easier application lifecycle management (ALM) and manage card access via Security roles and Data loss prevention policies (DLP).

Create cards in a solution

Makers can create cards for Power Apps directly in a solution. In the list of solutions, select the solution in which you want to add a new card to. Then, select New > Card:

Add existing cards to a solution

Makers can add existing cards for Power Apps to a solution. In the list of solutions, select the solution in which you want to add an existing card to. Then, select Add existing > Card:

Select the card you want to add and click Add

Change who can create cards with Security roles

Administrators can now use Security roles to control who can read, write and create cards for Power Apps in any Power Platform environment.

Disable cards for the environment

Administrators can disable cards for Power Apps feature for all users in a Power Platform environment by removing permissions for the Cards Role to create, read, or update the Card table. This will result in the unavailability of cards for Power Apps feature to all users in that environment.

Manage Cards for Power Apps connector with DLP

Makers can send cards in Power Automate flows with Cards for Power Apps connector, which is now governed by DLP.

Learn more

Learn more about cards for Power Apps capabilities in Cards for Power Apps overview – Power Apps and Card designer overview – Power Apps!

Join our Power Apps community to share your feedback and provide your comments!

The post Cards for Power Apps are now solution-aware for easier application lifecycle management (ALM) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.