Releasing the February Update for the Developer Tools (Power Platform CLI)
We are happy to finally release our February update for the Power Platform CLI. For those of you who are new, our pattern has been that we release an update for the work done in the last month, in the current month. Usually, we each include some new capabilities, along with the usual fixes that we hear from you folks along the way.
Firstly, we have a new icon for the Power Platform CLI and the Power Platform Developers tools in general, and it looks like this.
A lot of you folks had asked for something more meaningful to represent the developer tooling capabilities of power platform. Well, we finally delivered, and we are happy for it. Thank you all for your support. You will start seeing the icon updates happen shortly in all the relevant web tooling properties like the Visual Studio Code activity panel, Azure DevOps, Visual Studio Marketplace etc. just to name a few.
Less noisy solution.xml
Now let us get into the meat of things. We did not put a blog out in January, but one of the features that we included, and we did not talk about was that solution.xml is less noisy when diffing in source control repositories. Here is an example of the same solution files unpacked with an older version versus the new version of Power platform CLI. The new output is on the left-hand side of the picture below
New command!! (Preview) The fetch command
We knew a lot of folks in the community used the fetchxml capability to query dataverse, and our team’s internal build had a similar command that is used by our development team everyday. We have decided to make this command available in preview capacity for you all to use in the innerloop context. For those you who may not be aware of the fetch capability. Developers building applications for Power Platform usually need to query the dataverse instance to get various properties of the Dataverse entities in question. We now have the ability to do the same thing in the Power Platform CLI. When using the -x parameter remember to have all the XML nodes in a single line and not multiple lines or you can use the -xf and read it from the XML file
New Command !! pac admin status
When using the Admin commands, which operate in async mode, most of you had asked us, ” how do I really know if the async job request is done?”. Now we have a command that shows you the status of the async job with pac admin status
More details of the all the features are captured in the release notes at this link
Please try out these capabilities and give us feedback at the following location ISVFeedback@Microsoft.com or The PowerUsers community. Raise the issue and bugs at the following location in GitHub https://aka.ms/powerplatform-vscode.
