PowerApps CLI September update

[peterv333]

Today we released the latest version of the PowerApps CLI! In this update we took time to collect the top issues reported by our users and address them. We are also getting closer to our GA release and have reached an important milestone of crossing over into version 1.x! For our public preview users, this means updating your exiting project files (cdsproj, pcfproj) and package.json files as nuget and npm will not automatically update your projects from our 0.x versions to our 1.x versions. You can find the detailed upgrade steps in the tooling documentation.

If you have not yet updated your PowerApps CLI to the latest version, please take a minute to install the latest MSI by following these installation instructions.

Once you have the latest version of the CLI you can always refer to the tooling documentation to get started or to update your existing projects.

What improvements can you expect in this release?

PowerApps CLI

• We addressed issues when "pac solution init"  is used with a mix of upper and lower case letters.  To help you ensure that a valid prefix is used, CLI will now convert publisher prefix to lower case.
• To more closely align with other Microsoft CLI tools, we updated our syntax for argument short names. Going forward argument short names will require only a single dash.
• To help you ensure that duplicate project names aren’t accidentally used, we added validations that prevent solution projects from sharing the same name as those they reference.
• Based on user feedback the "pac pcf push" command will no longer attempt to delete the temporary solution but will reuse it for future “pcf push” operations. This will greatly improve performance and address several reported issues.

PowerApps CLI Test Harness

• We also took your feedback seriously and added support for default property values (defined by the default-value attribute). This means that default values set in your component will now automatically reflect in the test harness when the control is loaded.
• Several accessibility enhancements were added into the test harness to ensure that all users have the best experience!

PCF-Scripts (module for building components)

• PowerApps CLI will now notify you when a production build generates a bundle size larger than 5 MB before you try to import it to your org. This will save you a round-trip when a solution becomes unexpectedly large.
• PCF control properties defined in ControlManifest.Input.xml must now define the 'usage' attribute. To help you ensure that the attribute is added early on, we are validating it in the CLI build scripts.

MSBuild for PCF and Solution projects

• We realize that a number of you experienced issues with whitespaces included in the project paths and addressed all of these reported issues.

Let us know what you think!

We hope you enjoy all September updates in the PowerApps CLI and are excited to hear what you think. If you have questions or other feedback, please let us know on the PowerApps component framework forum. We look forward to hearing from you!

Thank you,
Peter Vaynerman

[Craig-MSFT]

As this is our first major version bump, I wanted to be sure and call attention to how to get fully upgraded to 1.x. Some changes for the v1 release were made that will cause issues if you have a mixture of 0.* and 1.* versions on your machine. First, be sure to read the article about updating existing controls and especially the section “Updating the project files.” 

Steps:

1. Upgrade to the latest CLI launcher by installing the latest MSI (just re-run the MSI again).
2. Ensure that you have the latest CLI by running 'pac install latest' (install the MSI first to fix a bug that was introduced by a change at nuget.org).
3. Upgrade your solution projects by bumping the package reference version in your cdsproj file to "1.*" Then, run 'msbuild /t:restore' in that project directory to get the latest nuget packages.
4. Upgrade your pcf projects:
   1. If you have run pcf push in the past, remove the .\obj directory.
   2. Bump the version of our pcf-* packages in package.json to "1^", then run 'npm update' in that project directory to get the new versions.
   3. Bump the package reference version in each pcfproj file to "1.*" and then run 'msbuild /t:restore' in that project directory.

To verify that you have the updated versions:

1. Run 'pac' and it will tell you the version it is running.
2. For solution projects, look in .\your-project-dir\obj\project.assets.json and check the version of Microsoft.PowerApps.MSBuild.Solution.
3. For pcf projects, look in .\your-project-dir\obj\project.assets.json and check the version of Microsoft.PowerApps.MSBuild.Pcf.
4. Also for pcf projects, look in .\your-project-dir\node_modules\pcf-scripts\package.json and check the _id field. Same for the pcf-start package.

Currently, these should all be 1.0.6.

Hope this helps.