It just takes a few seconds to connect your Dataverse environment to Git. You can connect and use Git integration within Power Apps, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Automate, and Power Pages. You’ll also need access to an Azure DevOps Git repository.

Rollout is in-progress. Git integration is currently available in public geos outside the US. Your environment must be enabled for early access and accessed at https://make.preview.powerapps.com.

As the team develops, Dataverse tracks everyone’s changes. When ready, commit your changes to a branch in the connected Azure DevOps Git repository. A commit link is provided to view the changes within the repository and compare diffs. You’ll notice solutions and solution objects are now stored in human readable formats in the repo.

Professional developers can work in source control while others work in one or more environments. It’s easy to pull others’ changes into other development environments which are connected to the same source code location. This allows team members to build without others editing in their environment and share changes once they’re ready. Connect multiple development environments using the same repo, branch, and folder. Then, in each environment create or import an unmanaged solution with the same name and publisher.

When committing and pulling changes, conflicts may be detected – meaning someone else made conflicting changes to the same object. You’ll need to choose whether to keep the version that’s in your environment or bring the version from source control into your environment. You can also revert changes in the repository, then pull the prior version into your environment.

When the team is ready to deploy to test or production, you can use Pipelines in Power Platform for the release. Building and deploying using developer tools isn’t available yet for this new format.

We hope you enjoy the preview. There are many current limitations and you shouldn’t use this feature in environments or Git folders where you’re developing production solutions. Please leave your feedback below, in the community forums, on social media, or another outlet of choice. We look forward to hearing what you’d like to see prioritized next.

Learn more

Overview of Power Platform Git integration

Setup Git integration

The post Introducing Git Integration in Power Platform (preview) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Overview

Power Platform Managed Identity utilizes workload identities based on Federated Identity Credentials (FIC). You have the option to provision either a User Assigned Managed Identity (UAMI) or an Application Registration and configure Federated Identity Credentials (FIC). Application Registration enables you to apply Azure policies to Power Platform resources, such as Dataverse plug-ins.

You have two options for provisioning of managed identities:

1. User Assigned Managed Identity (UAMI): You can provision a User Assigned Managed Identity (UAMI) in Azure. Dataverse plug-ins can use this identity to connect to Azure resources that support managed identity. In this case, you cannot enforce Azure policies.
2. Application Registration: By provisioning the application in Microsoft Entra ID, you establish an application context and Identity that can connect to Azure resources supporting managed identity.  This allows you to apply Azure policies to the application, ensuring that Power Platform resources, such as Dataverse plug-ins, adhere to these policies.

You need to configure Federated Identity Credentials (FIC) in both options to enable managed identity.

Supported scenario

Currently, Power Platform Managed Identity supports Dataverse plug-ins. This means that Dataverse plug-ins can connect to Azure resources that support managed identities without the need to manage credentials. By leveraging managed identities, the connection process becomes more secure and streamlined, as it eliminates the risks associated with credential management. This feature ensures that Dataverse plug-ins can access necessary Azure resources seamlessly and securely, enhancing overall efficiency and security.

Today we support Managed Identity for Independent Software Vendor (ISV) plug-ins within the context of their environment. For example, an ISV plug-in installed in the environment, will have access to the resources within the scope of the environment. However, it will not have to access resources within the ISV tenant.

Availability

Power Platform Managed Identity support for Dataverse plug-ins is available in public preview to all our customers in public cloud.

Call to action

• Start by following the step-by-step instructions – Set up Managed Identity support for Dataverse plug-ins
• Learn more about Power Platform Managed Identity
• Share your feedback

The post Announcing public preview of Power Platform Managed Identity support for Dataverse Plug-ins appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Summary: Today, we are thrilled to announce the much-anticipated Canvas Coauthoring experience is entering Preview and is now available for the public worldwide, including sovereign clouds. Coauthoring will bring a new level of collaboration and productivity to Power Apps developers.

Accelerate collaboration and productivity  

Gone are the days of waiting for one person to finish their edits before you can jump in! Now, multiple makers can edit a canvas app simultaneously in the same editing session. Coauthors will be able to see their own and colleagues’ changes compiled into a running app in real-time. Similar to Office-style collaboration, you will be able to see your teammates’ real-time presence via adorners in the command bar, tree view, and most importantly, authoring canvas so you will know exactly where and what your colleagues are working on in the app.  

Coauthoring allows multiple makers to work on different parts of a canvas app at the same time, speeding up the development process. This is dramatically faster than traditional development cycles of merging and compiling local changes that the previous solo editor experience allowed. This is also a major improvement for current Power Apps development teams, removing the need to divide efforts or consolidate changes from multiple app instances. We believe this will accelerate your app development cycles and we can’t wait to hear the amount of time and effort Coauthoring has saved your fusion teams! 

This is the latest in our collaboration updates, including Commenting and Coauthoring for Model Driven apps to drive collaboration and increase productivity for Power Apps developers.

How to start working with other developers

During Preview, Canvas Coauthoring will be off-by-default. To enable this experience, makers will need to toggle on the Coauthoring setting in the app they would like to coauthor in by going to Settings > Updates > Preview.   

The inital preview includes some limitations, documented here. As we build towards General Availability, you can expect fewer limitations and we would love your feedback on which features we should include next in our Coauthoring journey.  

Get started now 

We can’t wait for you to try Canvas Coauthoring while in the Preview stage. Your feedback will be instrumental in shaping the future of this feature as we journey towards GA. Please visit our documentation to learn more details about this experience.  

The post Build apps as a team with live coauthoring 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 the new capabilities for managing release channels, we will start gradually increasing the usage of Monthly Channel. The first step is to default the release channel for new model-driven apps to Monthly Channel. This rollout will be done more slowly so check for status at Release channel overview.

Setting App release channel

Makers will be able to set the App release channel in the App Designer within the Settings > General dialog. The choices are Auto, Monthly channel, or Semi-annual channel. The default value for existing apps is Auto which currently uses Semi-annual channel but with a future release will change to Monthly channel. The Monthly channel and Semi-annual channel values allow an explicit choice.

In December we will start gradually defaulting new model-driven apps to use Monthly channel when the app is created. After the app is created, you can change this to Semi-annual channel if you need a slower cadence. The new app channel defaulting can be disabled by change the app setting “Allow new app channel default” to no. See Changing release channels for more details.

Setting User channel override

To control the release channel at a level other environment or app level, an admin can override the release channel for one or more users. The Power Platform admin center Users list supports changing the channel. See Changing the user channel for more information.

Channel from environment, app, or user

When the model-driven app runs, the release channel uses the app channel if defined otherwise uses the environment channel. When an admin needs to configure a set of users with a different channel, the user channel override allows defining the channel for specific users overriding the app or environment channel. These can be managed either through the admin/maker UI or through API calls.

Monthly release validation

Monthly release changes are published four weeks before the features will be enabled by default within the monthly channel. To make the validation easier, we have added a new URL parameter to pick the next release instead of using the specific release name. See Validating the next monthly release for more details.

Please share any feedback on release channels at Monthly Channel Feedback.

The post Expanded Monthly Channel settings for model-driven apps appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

One of the key highlights is the introduction of service principal authentication. This feature enables you to authenticate as a service principal rather than using a user account. The advantage of this approach is that service principals do not rely on short-lived tokens that expire, making them an excellent choice for scenarios where you require continuous and uninterrupted access for automated processes, such as those within a Power Automate Flow. Using service principal authentication ensures that your automation remains unaffected even if the user associated with it leaves the company or becomes disabled. Custom connectors supporting OAuth 2.0 with Azure Active Directory as the identity provider can now be configured to enable service principal authentication. It’s as simple as checking a checkbox, and your custom connector will seamlessly support Service Principal Authentication, similar to some of our standard connectors like Azure Key Vault.

When service principal authentication is chosen, you can provide the necessary values for Client ID, Client Secret, and Tenant ID:

IMPORTANT: While Power Automate already has support for service principal authentication, this is not yet supported for Power Apps. For more information, click here.

Environment variables in policies

Environment variables play a vital role in facilitating application lifecycle management (ALM) scenarios, particularly when migrating an application or Flow between Power Platform environments. In this context, the application or Flow remains identical except for a few critical external references differing between the source and destination environments. Previously, environment variable support in custom connectors was limited to certain fields like Host, Base URL, and security properties. Now, we’ve expanded the scope of environment variables to include custom connector policies as well. You can reference an environment variable using the syntax:

@environmentVariables(“<EnvironmentVariableName>”).

We value your feedback and encourage you to explore these enhancements. Your input is invaluable in helping us refine and improve these capabilities further.

The post Public preview of new custom connector enhancements appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Today we are pleased to announce the general availability of open-source Power Fx 1.0. “1.0” means that the language definition is now stable and breaking changes will be managed and communicated. It is now ready for you to integrate in your production work loads. It will be coming to Power Apps later this year, details below.

Power Fx has always been about leverage. It was created to leverage the knowledge of millions of Excel users who already know how to write a formula. It expanded that leverage to all corners of the Power Platform, where learning how to write Power Fx in Power Apps meant that you could leverage that knowledge in Power Virtual Agents. And now with the release of Power Fx 1.0 it expands to open-source and all the places that you can imagine using it in your own projects.

What does this mean for Power Apps?

Immediately, not much. Power Apps today uses a pre-1.0 version of Power Fx. Over the next several months, we will be updating to 1.0 in order to match the rest of the Power Platform. Most of this work will be done under a new experimental feature switch which will be coming soon:

How is the formula language in Power Apps today and Power Fx 1.0 different? There are lots of small changes, most of which are nuances that most makers will never notice. For example, previously Sin(variable) would return a Blank() if variable was unitialized, and now it will return a 0 consistent with Excel. Very likely that will not impact anyone, but it could, and so we are going to treat these as breaking changes and have the switch above to enable the new semantics. When complete, new apps will be created with Power Fx 1.0 while existing apps will continue to run on the old language. No apps will break. We will publish a list of all these changes.

Why make changes now? Power Fx has evolved within Power Apps for many years and there were lots of internal inconsistencies and inconsistencies with Excel. Power Apps has a feature for updating the language in place but not all Power Fx hosts will have such a facility. Before publishing Power Fx 1.0, it was time clean up and stabilize the language.

Decimal

One of the bigger changes is the addition of a decimal data type. Business applications depend on precise currencies and quantities which is why 98% of Dataverse’s numeric fields are decimal, currency, or integers. Floating point is available but rarely used. One reason is that floating point is well known for rounding issues, resulting in the occasional math bug report in Power Apps. For example, 1.2-1.0 is very close to, but not exactly 0.2 in floating point. Supporting decimal math was a requirement for Power Fx to find a home in Dataverse.

With Power Fx 1.0, decimal is the default numeric type. For most hosts, we use the C#/.NET definition of a decimal capable of precisely holding the number 79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,335, with the decimal point placed anywhere within. That is many, many times the range and precision needed for financial calculations and gives us a much larger range for integers than floating point provides. It is 10 times the number of atoms in the human body, 60,000 times the number of milliliters of water in the oceans, oh and it absolutely dwarfs the gross domestic product of all countries on Earth.

Of course, floating point has its place, in particular for scientific calculations and for calculation speed. Not to fear, it is still available too. We’ll have more details as we roll out decimal to Power Apps as part of Power Fx 1.0 compatibility.

What does this mean for your projects?

You can now easily add Excel-like calculations and low code customizations to your own projects. Leverage open-source Power Fx 1.0 in anything you do, it as another tool in your toolbox. As open-source, Power Fx 1.0 is available for you to explore on NuGet and at https://github.com/microsoft/power-fx. It is trivial to use:

1. Create a new C# “Console App” in Visual Studio.
2. Use top level statements.
3. Install the package Microsoft.PowerFx.Interpreter from package source NuGet.org.
4. Copy this code into Program.cs:

using Microsoft.PowerFx;
using Microsoft.PowerFx.Types;
var engine = new RecalcEngine();
engine.UpdateVariable("base", 123456780000000m);
string formula = "Sum( base, 12345.6789, 900000.00000123456789 )";
decimal result = ((DecimalValue)engine.Eval(formula)).Value;
Console.WriteLine($"Deicmal: {result}");

Compile and run your console app and behold the output Decimal: 123456789012345.67890123456789, a C# decimal number that can’t be expressed in floating point, that used the Excel Sum function to aggregate three values including a variable. This example just scratches the surface with facilities for adding your own custom functions and connecting with external data sources, you can see more in Joris de Gruyter’s Power Fx demo at Build 2023. We even include an npm React formula bar based on Monaco the editor in Visual Studio Code for you to make editing formulas easy with IntelliSense.

Road ahead

Our mission is to create the easiest and most powerful system to express business logic for everyone, everywhere.

What comes next? As discussed, getting Power Apps on Power Fx 1.0 is a priority. We are also actively working on improvements to Power Fx hosting in Dataverse formula columns and Dataverse low code plugins. We’ll have more to talk about and show at the Microsoft Power Platform Conference in October.

Will there be a Power Fx 1.1 or 2.0? Yes, in time, there will be more versions of the language but we are in no rush. Changes will be driven by the needs of our makers and hosts and will be carefully managed. Engage with the community at https://github.com/microsoft/power-fx and let us know what you would like to see next.

The post Leverage Power Fx 1.0 appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

• custom connectors in solutions 

• environment variable secrets using Azure Key Vault secrets 

• connector activity logs 

These first two advancements empower you to extend the capabilities of the Power Platform and enhance your application lifecycle management (ALM) processes. 

Firstly, we are excited to bring custom connectors in solutions out of public preview and into General Availability. While Azure Logic Apps, Microsoft Power Automate, and Microsoft Power Apps offer over 1,000 connectors to connect to Microsoft and verified services, you may want to communicate with services that aren’t available as prebuilt connectors. Now your custom connectors can be easily transferred between environments via solutions. This includes the GA of custom code within your custom connectors which enables you to transform request and response payloads beyond the scope of existing policy templates.   

Additionally, we are delighted to announce the General Availability of support for environment variables using Azure Key Vault secrets. By leveraging Azure Key Vault, you can securely store and manage sensitive information, such as API keys, credentials, and connection strings. With environment variables, you can seamlessly access these secrets within your Power Automate Flows and custom connectors, ensuring that sensitive information remains protected and reducing the risk of accidental exposure. 

We would also like to announce GA of the Power Platform connector activity logs. The activity logging feature now allows you to view events related to connections and custom connectors. 

The post Announcing General Availability of Custom Connectors in Solutions as well as Environment Variable Secrets  appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Solutions can get very complicated very quickly, many times containing dozens of components that would be tedious to summarize and list out. As a maker deploying a solution through a pipeline, that summarization could be critical in providing your admin the context necessary to approve your deployment. Instead of spending minutes describing your solution, why not get Copilot to do it for you instantly?

Using the summarization powers of AI, Copilot will now provide makers a solution overview that includes a brief solution description as well as an overview of the components it contains. The more descriptive you make your solution components’ (e.g., Canvas Apps’) name and description, the more information this solution overview can provide.

This Public Preview feature is currently limited to U.S. environments and pipelines, but we are planning to expand the capabilities of Copilot across geographic regions with support for different languages. Eventually, we will be updating this feature to include a summary of version differences between deployments, keeping this solution overview structure for first deployments in a pipeline. This is also foundational for the future of solution descriptions in Managed Environments, making it easier than ever to manage solutions, so be sure to keep an eye out for that in the coming months!

Copilot is empowering Power Platform makers and admins to be exponentially more efficient, and simultaneously making ALM easier than ever before. Try it today when deploying using pipelines.

Learn more about pipelines

• Pipelines overview Microsoft docs
• Set up pipelines. Microsoft docs
• Run a pipeline. Microsoft docs
• Extend pipelines. Microsoft docs
• Use Copilot to generate deployment notes in pipelines (preview). Microsoft docs

The post Copilot now powers deployment notes for pipelines in Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We thank our community and users for the active engagement on the journey to modernize Power Apps. This blog outlines the modernization updates we rolled out or are rolling out on both canvas and model apps.

Modern controls updates in canvas apps

We recently released the following improvements for modern controls:

• New insert pane design for modern controls: We have established concept of modern & classic controls for fluent based vs current controls – a paradigm which will be used frequently as we progress towards canvas modernization. The same is now reflected in how our makers will use controls in studio. After enabling modern controls, if you open insert pane, you will see a new tab with all modern controls in it.
  

• Key control improvements: We are constantly shipping additional properties while also modifying existing properties based on your feedback. Here are the latest updates about the changes published in May:

We have many more updates exciting updates coming to control properties to enhance functionality as well as align on best practices for the control to be used by makers.

• Improved property reference & Enums:
  • We have simplified property references for modern controls. Earlier, the properties had long reference in format
    PowerApps.CoreControls.<Control name>.<Property name>.<Value>.
    The new format is <Control name>.<Property name>.<Value> to increase usability of these controls.
  • Earlier, many enum based properties were incorrectly represented as ‘strings’ confusing makers about the type of property. But we updated our infrastructure to correctly represent those values, now making it easy for our makers to manipulate them correctly.
    
• No more extra step for arrays to work on dataset based controls: We have removed the PCF limitation to select the default ‘value’ field in order to make dataset based controls work while providing an array as input. This increases usability and steps to configure key existing controls like tab list, radio button & dropdown, and also for upcoming controls like breadcrumb & combobox. Our makers can now directly add list of items in control and control will work as expected.
  

Visual improvements in model apps

We’ve also been improving our model driven app modern experiences. In May we’ve released the following updates to our modern apps preview.

• Dialogs: Dialogs now flow to the height of their content, reducing white space for small dialogs. The buttons and icons have also been modernized.

• Loading indicators: We’ve modernized loading indicators in the header and form. Loading spinners within the app have also been modernized.

What is next?

We will soon be making new theming available, initially for canvas apps and then subsequently model apps. The announcement will follow dedicated blog post later. We will also release new controls soon – Combobox, Toggle, Slider & Breadcrumb. And as mentioned above, we will continuously update property sets and enhance functionality of existing controls to make them production ready. We are releasing improvements each week. We will add the release notes link in the comments below.

For model apps, we are working towards modernizing remaining experiences and enabling dark mode as part of upcoming general availability. We will provide more details in the next blog post.

The post May 2023 updates for modernization in Power Apps appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.