What’s new in Power Apps: February 2025 Feature Update
AI-powered Development
Code View is now Generally Available
We are thrilled to announce that Code View in Power Apps Studio is now generally available! This milestone marks a significant step forward in our mission to enable citizen developers and professional developers to collaborate seamlessly, enabling everyone to build faster.
Key features introduced during the public preview:
Sharing: Makers can use code snippets to share their work using Microsoft Teams, email or forums, facilitating collaboration and reuse.
Code View: Developers can view the code for each control, making it easier to understand the app’s functionality
Copy and paste: The ability to copy any control within Studio as YAML + Power Fx code and paste it into a code editor for modifications.
Elevate your Power Platform development experience with Power CAT Tools
We are thrilled to announce the launch of Power CAT Tools, a comprehensive suite of features designed to enhance your development experience within the Power Platform. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just getting started, Power CAT Tools community offering provides valuable resources to help you build robust and efficient solutions with greater ease.
Power CAT Tools feature suite is designed to streamline your development workflow with capabilities that automate essential tasks and provide insightful guidance based on real-world best practices. This powerful suite of features includes:
- Code Review Tool: Automatically reviews your code to ensure adherence to best practices and standards, helping you identify and rectify potential issues early in the development process.
- AI generated solution documentation: Leverages artificial intelligence to create detailed and accurate documentation for your solutions, saving you time and effort.
- Risk assessment: Evaluates potential risks in your solutions and provides actionable mitigation strategies, ensuring the stability and security of your projects.
- API playground: Offers a Postman-like experience for testing and exploring APIs, simplifying the process of integrating and debugging APIs.
- Plugin monitor: Monitors and analyzes plugin performance and behavior, providing insights to help you optimize your plugins for better efficiency and reliability.
The Power CAT Tools solution is a distinctive community offering provided by the Microsoft Power CAT team, designed to elevate your development experience beyond what the native platform offers. Built on the low code platform itself, this open-source repository ensures transparency and offers unique insights into development best practices that are not available natively. The tools suite helps build robust and efficient solutions by making it easier for makers to adhere to best practices.
Create and Use Power Fx Functions Public preview
We are introducing the public preview for Create and Use Power Fx Functions in Power Platform. This preview will streamline the process for creating business logic as Power Fx functions to be used in your Canvas apps and Power Automate.
Previously, you were able to create business logic using the low-code instant plugins or using custom classes compiled in .Net framework. With the new public preview, you will now be able to create this business logic as Power Fx functions with minimal or no coding required on the Power Apps portal.
Functions are customized business logic that run a set of specific commands within Dataverse. These are server-side business logic and can be reused across multiple apps and solutions within Power Apps. This allows you to standardize business logic to promote consistency and scalability across your organization.
Enterprise-Grade Governance
Govern Critical AI Settings and More with Environment Groups
What’s new: we’re excited to introduce 3 powerful new rules for Environment Groups, designed to give tenant administrators greater control over critical environment settings, including those for Copilots and Agents. You can now configure at scale:
AI prompts
AI-powered Copilot features (preview)
Power Apps component framework for canvas apps
Why this matters: as the adoption of Power Platform soars in your company, maintaining control over key environment settings becomes increasingly crucial. These new rules allow IT to apply settings in bulk across many environments, locking them at the environment level to prevent unauthorized changes by administrators of individual environments. This approach empowers IT to delegate administration and governance to other teams without relinquishing control over key environment settings.
How the new rules work: the new rules function exactly like existing ones. When you publish a rule, it is applied uniformly to all environments within the group. These rules also lock the settings at the environment level, preventing administrators of individual environments from modifying them.
Next steps: these additional rules are automatically available within each environment group and tenant administrators must explicitly configure these rules for them to take effect. And the excitement doesn’t stop here—more rules will be added periodically, so stay tuned for continuous enhancements!
Intelligent Apps
Introducing Visualize with Copilot
Every business decision starts with insights backed by data. However, trying to spot trends while staring at rows and columns of data isn’t exactly the most efficient way to get insights. Manually exporting data, creating charts and adjusting filters can be time-consuming and frustrating, creating spreadsheet fatigue. What if you could skip all this busy work and get straight to insights? We’re introducing Visualize with Copilot, a new capability that instantly transforms your business data into a meaningful interactive chart. Whether you’re tracking sales or driving customer service excellence or managing inventory, Visualize with Copilot can help you see the bigger picture instantly.
Learning and Documentation Updates
Powerful Devs Conference – Available Now On-Demand!
The wait is over! Powerful Devs Conference is now available to stream on demand, bringing you the best insights on Power Platform for enterprise app development. Whether you’re looking for expert guidance or real-world demos, you can catch it all at your convenience.
Training Paths and Labs
Updated Training
Documentation Updates
Clay leads the Power Apps Studio product team, enabling the next generation of developers and app makers on the Microsoft Power Platform with AI assisted development. This spans across our Power Apps maker tools, Copilot for Power Apps makers, Pro Dev tooling, Dataverse experiences, and Power Fx.
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