Code Apps - Office Hours November 2025 Highlights

 This week, I had the pleasure of attending the Code Apps Office Hours with Austin Laugesen and Jordan Chodak from the Power Apps Code Team. They shared the latest updates and answered community questions.

Latest News - November 2024

The first updates relates to updates to the PAC CLI release to better support Dataverse and SharePoint. For Dataverse, there is now full CRUD support for choice and option values. The GetEntityMetadata method has also been added, which allows developers to return the full table definition, including columns and types. This has been a big request from the community.

Some of that functionality has also been made available for SharePoint. There is CRUD support for choice, people, and lookup columns. The GetReferenceEntity method has also been introduced, which allows you pull valid lookup values from related lists.

Developer Experience and API Updates

In terms of developer experience, the "Get Context API" is now available. This provides runtime context, such as environment and user values, which we can use directly in our code.

One of the biggest pain points the team have heard about is environment migration. For this reason, connection references have been added. When we add a data source, we can use these references to simplify deployment across different environments.

When debugging, a log level specification has been added to the CLI commands. We can now set our logs to info, debug, warn, or error. 

Finally, the slide decks and the code samples from the PPCC conference are live on GitHub. Also, documentation on Dataverse CRUD examples and guidance on setting up Azure Application Insights have been added.

The Roadmap: Late 2025 and 2026

For December 2025, our main focus of the Code App team is on the "preferred solution" experience. The aim is to ensure that Code Apps auto-save to the solution we're actually working in, and to add support for the Solution Packager.

For early 2026, specifically January and February, the team are targeting General Availability (GA). Along with GA, they aim to add support for Content Security Policies (CSP). By default, this will be a strict policy to ensure security best practices. Native source control support is also a priority after the GA milestone.

The longer-term backlog includes things like application settings, Gov Cloud support, and the ability to invoke Power Automate flows directly from Code Apps. There are also tasks for expanding mobile support and more complex Dataverse operations.

Questions Answered

This part of the session focused on addressing questions from attendees.

Question 1: Will there be support for GitHub Enterprise?

Support for GitHub Enterprise is on the roadmap for Power Platform ALM generally. The goal with native source control is to ensure that everything we build in the platform can be mastered in a repository as human-readable source code. This includes Code Apps.

Question 2: I'm having trouble with SharePoint URLs and encoding. Is there a fix coming?

The team are aware of issues with URL encoding when connecting to certain SharePoint lists. They are working on a fix to remove these encoding requirements to make it more seamless.

Question 3: Can we do relational expansion in queries?

This requirement iscurrently in the backlog. The team know people want to write syntax like user.teams.membership to drill down through relationships in a single query. This feature is coming, but it’s not in the current release. 

For now, if we have very advanced Dataverse requirements, we can call the Web API directly, but we will need to handle the tokens manually for that.

Question 4: What are the licensing requirements for end users?

Code Apps follow the standard Power Apps licensing model. End users will require Premium Power Apps licenses. From a permissions standpoint, it works like Canvas Apps. We can share code apps with individual users or security groups as long as they have the right environment access.

Question 5: I'm seeing an issue where the PAC CLI is unreachable in VS Code. Is this a known bug?

There have been one or two reports of the latest VS Code extension losing the connection to the PAC CLI and the engineering team are investigating this.

Question 6: How does Copilot fit into this?

The Code Apps team are working closely with the GitHub Copilot team. They want to make sure the Copilot experience for Code Apps is top-tier, and designed to help those who might not be traditional "pro-coders" get up to speed with the syntax and the Power Fx logic required.

Conclusion

This meeting provided valuable insights into ongoing development of Code Apps. Many thanks to Austin Laugesen and Jordan Chodak for organising this.