Everything You Need to Know About Power Platform – February 2022

Hello from mid-America where warmer weather is getting rolled out to us in snippets, but most days are still being spent in the cold weather environment. Microsoft is doing something like our recent weather with its Power Platform in February as they’ve begun revealing some newer 2022 rollout code in preview mode.

This month was an interesting one for Microsoft’s Power Platform, though there was nothing really Canvas apps specific to report. I guess that just means more room for those other pieces of the platform we should all know more about anyway. Anyway, let’s get to everything you need to know about Power Platform in February 2022.

Model-driven apps updates (Preview) 

If you’re a Dynamics 365 customer building tables in Dataverse, you may have already noticed the new preview environment for Model-driven apps. Users will be able to use what’s known as the “modern experience” or revert to the “classic experience”.

You can begin using pieces that look more like canvas apps with a smoother integration with canvas apps as well. Grid and view pages will begin with the modern experience, and users can opt-in for updates including the Modern Advanced Find, In-App Notifications, and enhanced Collaboration. Very cool! 

Installing the Power Platform extension for VS Code 

On the ProDev end of the spectrum, Microsoft has revealed an alternate way to install VS Code extensions through the Visual Studio Marketplace. This is designed to help IT pros in an organization that restricts downloaded installation executables. 

Power Apps portals available as mobile apps 

You can now enable a functional portal as a progressive web app that looks and feels like a native app from the portal studio. Though still in preview, this post tells you how to do it and gives you a taste of what your deployed app could look like. 

The design interface looks more like the canvas app now, and it is designed to be low code. You can use the new functionality to manage your basic offline/disconnected experience as well. 

Power Apps model-driven localizing content on a Custom Page 

There is another preview for model-driven Power Apps which allows developers to create a Custom Page with localized content. This will enable certain content (on the Custom Page) to be displayed according to different regional settings.

The page would be able to display in the local language of your user and read right to left, for example. This article walks you through how to enable that for your app. 

Power Automate for desktop update 

Some cool features have just been rolled out for Power Automate for desktop. They include a notification window for monitoring your attended desktop flow runs, a ‘Display custom form’ action (Preview) which allows you to create your own dialogue in the format of an Adaptive Card.

Other notable additions include new actions to convert files to Base64 (and back), and an action to “Extract tables from PDF” where users can identify and extract structured tables from a PDF document.   

Power BI updates for February 

There’s a whole slew of updates for Power BI in February that you can see here. Some notable ones include the ability to use mobile formatting (Preview – applies to Power BI mobile), sensitivity labels being applied downstream from the point of inheritance, labeling enhancements, and the new Format Pane (Preview) being on by default. 

That’s just a taste of what we can expect with the Wave 1 of Power Platform updates this year. The February 2022 changes for Microsoft’s Power Platform are certainly focused on the Premium/Pro-Dev side of Power Apps, but there’s certainly more headed our way.