We’re following along with Microsoft as they’re releasing new features for Public Preview including the new Power Platform admin center, the new Power Apps Plan designer, the new Data Workspace functionality, and new SQL to Dataverse features.
The Power Platform admin center has been upgraded, and you can select the toggle at the top right of the home screen to see what it looks like. You’ll note the new by-task organization of it in clickable links on the left-side navigation rail. For example, if you want to manage your Environments, you select the Manage button. Also new in this interface are the new Monitor (which is still being rolled out) and Deployment hubs. Lastly, the home screen of the admin center allows you to customize your view by adding/removing cards as well as drag-and-drop functionality with the cards to arrange them just so.
The Power Apps plan designer is a new way to enlist Copilot to help you in crafting solutions to your business problems. You can get to it by toggling on the new Power Apps experience from the top right of the home page. Now you can add natural language prompts to let Copilot know the specifics of your business problem. Copilot will provide an outline of your business problem, giving you some proposed apps, data tables, and flows as a solution. Copilot allows you to continue to add prompts through the design process to help you refine what’s going on. Shane has recently provided a video of how this works if you want to see it in practice. You will need to have a Dataverse equipped environment to experience this functionality, but it is a superb way to streamline the business problem process, getting from problem to solution in a very short time.
The Data Workspace is the new visual editor to see your tables created on a canvas and to view them together along with their relationships. It’s a great way to create, add, and modify new tables manually or with Copilot’s help. You get there from the Create new tables choice from the Tables tab. You can toggle which columns you want to show, add new columns, and create/manage table relationships. Microsoft is working to add this same functionality with existing tables, but for now, you can add existing tables to the Data Workspace in “read-only” mode. If you want to edit existing tables, you’ll still have to open that table in a separate tab. Overall, this is a really nice interface for interacting with your tables and their relationships.
Microsoft gave SQL developers some love in January. They’ve included the ability to define SQL Server environment variables in your solution. As you create the environment variable, you can now select “SQL” as the connector and then enter the connection details in the “New environment details” parameter.
Also, connections to virtual tables now include PostgreSQL. It’s easier than ever to connect to your SQL data with Dataverse.
We’ll certainly be trying out these new features this month!
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