Power Platform Release Wave 1 2024: New goodies!

Another year another set of updates 🚀. Most notable for me is a new format of presentation, a whole new site dedicated to the release plan is available on http://releaseplans.microsoft.com. With tons of new updates, usual suspects and a whole lot of AI 🤖. As the last few years I try to do a write-up for the things I feel are the most important to keep an eye out for.

Modern Screen templates

We all love things that look pretty and some of the Power App parts still look a bit clunky. The new templates are designed to be more visually appealing and easier to use, so that sounds promising. Any time I can spend on building logic rather than fiddle with how it should look is a win for me. Read the full announcement for more details. But hey, better looking stuff is cool!

Power Pages and ALM

The Power Platform CLI will support Power Pages with more options, meaning we can finally build the more complex CI/CD scenarios we typically see when developing a portal. The CLI has been around for a while, and in most of our projects we use it as part of our pipelines. Somewhere in April we can finally also use it for Power Pages. Read the full announcement for more details. That and the fact that there also will be support for the Site Checker makes me wonder if we should expand our Power Platform naming convention checker to Power Pages as well..

Dataverse and Fabric

The Microsoft Dataverse direct integration with Microsoft Fabric means you can get your Dynamics 365 enterprise applications and business processes into Fabric, or if you have build complex data models for your low code scenarios you can more easily expose that now as well. The View in Microsoft Fabric feature built into Power Apps makes all your Dynamics 365 and other data from Power Apps available for analysis in Fabric. This brings the world of low code and the data and AI world closer together!

Copilots

As expected a lot of the announcements where around CoPilot and they all look awesome. I just couldn’t pick my favorites and figured that I wanted to focus on the other low code scenarios in this plan. With all the CoPilot announcements I am sure we will see a lot of new features and improvements in the coming months, but they do deserve a dedicated blog.

All in all another great set of improvements coming 🚀! And I am sure to keep an eye out for the next few months of changes. If you want you can read them all here.