Rajeev Pentyala – Microsoft Power Platform

With 2021 Wave 1, lots of new features introduced across the Power Platform (i.e., Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents) and the two add-ins (i.e., AI Builder and Power Apps portals).

2021 Release Wave 1 Plan, contain the features releasing from April 2021 through September 2021. Features list can be downloaded from here.

In this article, lets see the few key features/enhancements included in this release.

Dependent assemblies for plug-ins:

• Plug-in developers have long used an unsupported capability provided by the ILMerge utility to combine a plug-in assembly plus any needed dependent assemblies together into a single .NET assembly.
• The dependent assemblies capability provides a supported way for developers to include additional dependent assemblies along with the plug-in assembly when registering a plug-in.

Plug-in telemetry with Application Insights integration:

• Customers who have associated their Environment with their Application Insights resource can view telemetry for log events written from their plug-in code.
• ILogger is a standard interface for writing log events.
• ILogger interface enables writing log events for a set of log levels, such as Trace, Debug, Information, Warning, Error.
• The developer doesn’t need to configure or include Application Insights SDK assemblies because everything is already set up.

Advanced lookup:

• With Advanced lookup you can easily sort rows and switch between tables or views in a lookup column.
• Advanced lookup supports customizations on lookup control through Client APIs such as addCustomView, addCustomFilter, addPreSearch and removePreSearch.
• We also got Regarding advanced lookup and Party list advanced lookup.

Multi-table lookups:

• If you are familiar with data type Customer, which connects to both Account and Contact, its Multi-table lookup.
• Multi-table lookup type columns allow a user to employ a specific table that has multiple one-to-many (1:M) relationships to other tables in the environment. A single lookup type column can refer to multiple other tables.
• This new feature gives users the power to define any other multi-table lookups they may need.

Removing business units from security role assignments:

• Business units can be removed from a user’s security role assignment for ease of use and to simplify the business unit security model.
• By decoupling a user’s business unit from their security role’s business unit, they can be assigned security roles from different business units. This allows the user to access the respective business units without the need to create and join the owner team.

Virtual Connector Provider for tabular connectors:

• As we know, Virtual tables (Formerly known as ‘Virtual Entity’) enable the integration of external enterprise data with Microsoft Dataverse without the need for data duplication.
• With the introduction of the Virtual Connector Provider for Dataverse, data residing outside of Microsoft Dataverse can be easily represented and used as Microsoft Dataverse virtual tables using supported tabular connectors (for example, SQL Server, OneDrive, Excel, SharePoint, and more).

Model-driven app adds in-app notifications:

• In-app notifications in model-driven apps are shown to users as a notification or in the notification center.
• Notifications are directed to a specific user and can be sent through external systems, Power Automate, or from within the system.

Power Apps component framework for canvas app:

• Public preview of Power Apps component framework allows developers and makers to add datasets and test their custom components in canvas apps, taking advantage of the growing list of supported framework APIs.
• Pro-dev extensibility on a low-code platform opens up possibilities enabling the best of both worlds.

Link a Microsoft Dataverse environment to Azure Synapse Analytics workspace and bring Dynamics 365 data to Azure:

• With this feature, you can use Export to Data Lake to link a Microsoft Dataverse environment to Azure Synapse Analytics workspace and bring Dynamics 365 data that’s stored in Microsoft Dataverse to Azure.
•  It enables a seamless integration with Azure Synapse, which provides the necessary compute to analyze data in the Data Lake using features, such as SQL on-demand.
• These features provide a familiar T-SQL syntax to query data in the Data Lake without the need to copy or load data into a specialized store.

Auditing enhancements:

The following changes have been made to Auditing:

• Audit data is stored in log storage.
• Administrators can set a retention period for audit data.
• Expired data will automatically be removed from the system per the retention period.
• Joining entities from the database storage and the log storage will no longer be possible.

Bypass Custom Business Logic:

• Refer my previous article on this feature.

🙂