Maker Deployment page

Makers can now view all their deployments in one place, regardless of solution or pipeline. If their deployment began from (or was deployed to) the current environment, they will be able to view the run history status of it. Failed Deployments and Active Deployments are highlighted in a convenient overview, so you don’t have to go looking for them either!

In addition to deployment visibility, we’ve included a Get started section that will evolve over time. For now, it will link to documentation to help a maker begin their journey to healthy application lifecycle management (ALM).

To further improve understanding of what healthy ALM looks like, we’ll soon be adding recommendations, where makers are alerted to resolve any potentially unhealthy ALM-related behavior, such as housing high-use apps outside of a solution.

Admin Deployment page

The Deployment page in the new admin center provides a streamlined experience to help administrators learn about, setup, and operation best-in-class ALM. The initial preview provides a central location to view all deployments in the tenant, approve deployment requests, and troubleshoot failures.

Select a pipelines host from the picker to see all the pipelines and deployment history managed with that host. A dedicated Failed deployments view helps admins quickly identify and troubleshoot failures and trending issues.

Admins can approve or reject deployment requests assigned to them. First setup Delegated deployments with service principals as the recommended way to deploy securely.

It is important that admins review changes in the solution and the sharing request. With the help of Copilot-generated deployment notes visible in the request, this becomes easier, but if you want a more granular look, be sure to set up Source control integration and link the repository to the approval.

Managed Operations

The Deployment pages are an offering of Managed Operations, allowing all who make or administrate to gain further insight into their Application Lifecycle Management to ensure that business solutions are reliable and performant in production. Aside from just deployment pipelines, these maker and admin experiences will evolve over the coming months and include many more Managed Operations intersections to take advantage of. So, stay tuned for more updates and please leave your feedback below!

Learn more

Admin Deployment page

Maker Deployment page

Managed Operations

New Power Platform Admin Center

The post Introducing Maker and Admin Deployment Pages appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

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.

Like with SharePoint, this feature operates with any natively bound gallery where the gallery is directly populated by SharePoint and not by a collection or variable.

Using Copilot with filter

Open a running app that uses a gallery against SQL Server.  If you have a premium license (which is required for the SQL Server connector), then you will see an adorner on your gallery.

Copilot supports three kinds of queries – filter, sort, and search.  While you can type any query you might like, it suggests possible questions based on your data in your app at the time. Note that Copilot over SQL supports an additional verb “in” that SharePoint does not support. It will search for an occurrence of your search text inside of a record value.

Copilot then scopes the records to satisfy the query. It displays a “Filtered” badge in the upper right corner of the gallery.  The exact query that was executed is displayed as a tag. And you can continue to refine your query with additional details by adding more query commands.

Filter, sort, and search galleries with Copilot to filter provides five key benefits:

• Copilot makes end users more productive and saves time. If an author has not built in search and sort capabilities, Copilot enables this scenario and makes them more productive. End users save time with the ability to directly express their query in natural language.
• Copilot saves author’s development time. Authors save time developing apps because they don’t need to develop all the UI controls necessary for the app. Instead, they can rely on Copilot for this functionality.
• Copilot enables queries over the full query result – not just what you can see in the gallery. Users can filter, sort, and search on fields even if the application doesn’t provide UI controls for these tasks. For example, you can search for records even if the application doesn’t have a search bar.
• Copilot is query safe. It only generates queries that can be run on the server. Authors don’t need to worry about whether or not their queries can be delegated.
• Copilot keeps private data private. It only works with the data that is normally returned to the application. It doesn’t access fields that aren’t returned to the app in a gallery/grid or form.

Create a new app with Studio version on or after 3.24092.17 or re-publish an existing app with this version. Then access your app while it is running. (Copilot with filter only appears at runtime, it does not appear inside of Studio.) Select an item in the gallery to start using Copilot with filter.

See the documentation for this feature for more details. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/user/smartgrid

The post Use Copilot to quickly filter, sort, and search canvas app galleries with SQL Server appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In October’23, we continued enhancing modern controls and theming and delivered some key enhancements as mentioned in this blog, which is rolling out to our customers at the time of publish. Our ongoing investments spans across improving existing controls, improving theming, and adding new controls to be used by makers.

A step ahead – general availability of some modern controls in canvas apps

Many of Power Apps customers have already started adopting these controls at scale. To support them in their journey, we have now started transitioning controls from preview to general availability starting Nov 13^th. The first set of controls are – Button, Link, Slider, Tab list and Progress Bar. This list is based on high satisfaction reported by makers and critical feedback addressed on these controls. In coming weeks, we will continue to add more customization capabilities like font color, background color, padding and more – on all controls. With this update, we will also be now providing full supportability to generally available modern controls to our customers.

We will continue this momentum and soon transition more controls (including the input controls) to general availability by early January. The remaining controls will be moved to the GA stage individually on a week-by-week basis.

Despite moving some controls to GA, modern controls and theming will continue to be an opt-in feature until the end of this year. We will, however, be moving the opt-in setting from upcoming features panel to general tab in settings by end of 2023 and will be turning modern controls on by default progressively for new apps in the next year, as we continue addressing reported gaps and adding new capabilities to these controls for our makers.

Enhancements to modern controls & theming

Below are the updates made to controls in the last month:

• Font size and color property: In an effort to extend customization capabilities on controls, we added the capability to update the base palette color and font size on controls. It provides our makers capability to customize the color and font size of text within a control. These properties provide makers the ability to customize the font size of text within a control and the color palette used to style the control. This update will be followed by adding more font-related and visual customizations in coming month(s).
  

• Improvements to controls for general availability: We enhanced Button, Link, Slider, Tab list and Progress bar as following:
  1. We updated the controls to provide right output properties.
  2. All accessibility issues have been fixed and controls are ready for prime time.
  3. Overflow menu and padding to tab and button are now optimized to have the best experience for our end users.
  4. We are setting better defaults and sample data for all controls.
     
• Introducing field validations: Field validations represent a significant improvement for managing error conditions in input controls in Power Apps. This is done through a new property we introduced called – ValidationState – that is applicable for all input controls. This property has two states – None, Error, with controls in an error validation state showing red borders.
  
  Makers can leverage this property using PowerFx to write advanced scenarios for error handling and can also describe patch rules based on the value in this property. The new form control also now uses this property for error handling by default!

• Table control: The Table control now supports more connectors, including Excel, SQL, and SharePoint connectors. With this update, we have removed the limitation of only supporting the Dataverse connector. We have also fixed the issue where ids were showing choice type columns for Dataverse tables.
  

• Form control: We have updated the current form control in preview to now support combo box for choice type and multi-select scenarios out of the box. We also fixed the title issues in the horizontal layout of the form by introducing right truncation patterns.
  
• Theme pane accessibility: As we continue attracting new Power Apps makers in huge numbers, we have addressed the remaining accessibility issues for the Themes pane.

Upcoming enhancements to modern controls and theming:

We are currently working on few exciting updates and will be released in few weeks:

• Font properties on all applicable controls: You will soon be able to customize font, font color, font weight and font style on all modern controls.
  
• More customization options on text control: We are in process of updating text control to also support background color and padding for our makers to use these controls effectively.
  
• Table control: We are introducing additional customization properties on table control:
  • Show Avatar: You will soon be able to show and hide avatars in your list view of the table control.
  • Show Footer: You will soon be able to show and hide footers in your table visual.
  • Show column headers: You will soon be able to show and hide column headers in your table visuals based on the scenario makers want table to achieve.

• New color picker for base palette color: Since the BasePaletteColor property generates a new color ramp that is applied to a modern control (and not a single-color selection), we are updating the color picker to better communicate the selection of a set of colors rather than an individual color.

• Modern controls and theming will be default on in preview: Before end of this year, all new apps built in make.preview.powerapps.com (and in preview environment), will have modern controls enabled by default as a control set. The opt-in setting will still be part of general tab and can be switched off, if required.
  
• Fluent icons: Makers will be able to add standalone icons. Makers will also be able to add an icon on the button.

We sincerely thank our community and makers for continuing to provide us feedback and help us build these capabilities. We will continue to ship updates to improve our controls and theming in response to the feedback we receive from you all.

The post October updates for modernization in canvas apps (includes GA of few modern controls) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Modern controls updates in canvas apps

We made additional progress in the month of September on the journey to modernize Power Apps with the release of new controls and improvements on existing controls.  Below are the updates released in last month:

New controls released:  

• Header – Our first out-of-the-box building block that allows you to simply and quickly create a reusable app shell that is fully responsive and themeable. The first version of the control supports a logo, page title, and user avatar and allows you to pick between a few different style variants. Next in our sights for header is support for app navigation. We are actively monitoring any feedback you provide for this control, so don’t be shy about hitting the thumbs up or down and giving us feedback.
  

• Modern Form control – We have a new form control based on modern controls in development which aligns better with the new design language and similar in functionality of existing form controls with no new learning curve for our makers. Support for combo box and some more field types will be shipped in upcoming updates on modern control. The validations pattern will also improve with the upcoming updates in form.

Key control improvements:

Below are the important updates we made to the controls last month

1. Table  
   • We have expanded our dataset support to include collections. 
   • The Selected output property is now populated correctly when the Table renders in narrow list mode.  
   • The list displays the expected layout when placed inside a container. 
     
2. Per control styling – Do you need a red button in your green app? You can now change the color palette of an individual modern control to be different from the theme using the new Base palette color property. This is a single property that impacts any surface of the control using a theme color, including interaction states like the hover and pressed states. If you later decide you want the color of your control to be driven by the theme again, simply click the Revert button next to the property or clear the value of BasePaletteColor.

What is next?

There are several awesome capabilities that we are going to be bringing over the coming weeks:  

• Font size property – Look out for Font size options being available on the modern controls next! Similar to color property, makers will be able to assign font size to controls which will impact all the right elements in the control. And similar to color property, makers will be able to reset it back to default with a single click.

• Upcoming controls
  • We are about to release new control for number input with decimal support.
  • Makers will be able to add standalone icons and add a button and enable the property to add an icon on the button.
    
    
    
  • For form control, the support for combo box and in-built field validations will be rolled out in coming weeks too.

And a BIG THANK YOU!! to all the Power Apps makers and users who made it to Microsoft Power Platform Conference’23. We had great time interacting with all of you and your feedback on modern controls has been super valuable to us!

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

The Creator Kit, published by the Microsoft Power CAT team, is a collection of 24+ Fluent UI controls and templates for Power Apps makers to create delightful app experiences more rapidly.

What’s included

The Creator Kit is distributed in three managed solutions, each containing unique components:

All controls and components included in the kit use the Fluent UI framework to help easily create consistent, beautiful, and effective user experiences for custom business applications.

Creator Kit (CreatorKitCore)

A solution that contains the core components of the Creator Kit:

	Display name	Type	Status
	AutoWidthLabel	Code	Stable
	Breadcrumb	Code	Stable
	Calendar	Code	Preview
	CommandBar	Code	Preview
	ContextMenu	Code	Stable
	Dialog	Canvas	Experimental
	Elevation	Code	Stable
	ExpandMenu	Canvas	Experimental
	DetailsList	Code	Stable
	Header	Canvas	Experimental
	Icon	Code	Stable
	KeyboardShortcuts	Code	Stable
	Nav	Code	Stable
	Panel	Canvas	Experimental
	Picker	Code	Stable
	ProgressIndicator	Code	Preview
	ResizableTextArea	Code	Stable
	SearchBox	Canvas	Experimental
	Shimmer	Code	Preview
	Spinner	Code	Preview
	TagList	Code	Stable

See the control reference for all updated controls and their status.

You will notice some components are marked as preview or experimental. Preview is tagged for controls added recently, and experimental is if an underlying platform capability a component depends on is not generally available (e.g., canvas components are not supported in custom pages).

Reference Solutions

These solutions provide templates and utilities for building with Creator Kit components in canvas apps vs custom pages (embedded in Model Driven apps).

Each reference solution contains a reference application that lets you interact with each component and see the underlying formulas that render it. It’s a great way to quickly learn how the components behave and are implemented.

Real world scenarios

Custom Outlook Panel

The kit components were used created a flyout experience in the Outlook web app using the Panel, Elevation, and Icon controls. Posted by Mats Necker.

CoE Starter Kit Environment Management refresh

The Environment Creation Request experience to view a request in detail, migrated into a custom page. part of the CoE Starter Kit.

Get Started

Start using the Creator Kit by reading the setup instructions.

Support

Report bugs in our GitHub repository issues. Our team will triage issues with the Creator Kit components. See our support documentation for more guidance.

Feedback

We host our backlog in the GitHub repository to make our roadmap publicly available. We largely depend on community feedback to prioritize feature development and continued investment in the kit.

Upvote (?) backlog items you would like to see in the kit next to help our team determine the demand for each component. Work that is committed will be associated with a specific release.

You can also submit a feature request if the backlog does not have the Fluent UI components or capabilities you need.

Everyone benefits from the Creator Kit

The kit provides many improvements that affect Power Platform makers, users, and admins:

• Makers can focus efforts on building the problem-solving features of an application. The cohesive Fluent UI design makes it easier to make custom pages look more consistent and like model driven apps. You don’t need to be a front-end prodigy – or have budget for a design team – the kit will help you make stunning apps with the latest and most contemporary designs.
  
• Users will interact with the cohesive set of components that are intuitive and familiar (same controls used in all modern Microsoft applications). The components provide a performance boost which also provides a better user experience, which can help users be more productive while using your apps.
  
• Administrators who must govern UI consistency within an organization benefit from the modern theming architecture that Fluent UI provides inherently in the kit’s components. The components are developed and supported by dedicated engineering teams at Microsoft, so companies can deploy apps with Creator Kit components into production with confidence.

Additional Resources

• GitHub Repository – Master
• GitHub Repository – Code components
• User Interface Guidance Documentation
• Fluent UI Documentation

The post Introducing the Creator Kit – Efficiently create performant Fluent UI based Power Apps appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.