Kicking off its virtual Build conference today, Microsoft announced new additions and improvements for Power BI, and a more varied set of tools and insights for Power Apps and Power Automate. With regards to the Power Platform in general, low-code updates and fusion development have now been unveiled to be arriving soon.
As far as low-code updates are concerned, organizations will now be supported to deliver automations and bots in a more efficient manner. Teams that comprise citizen-makers, professional developers, or even both kinds of members can now leverage new features for fusion development. Fusion development teams are noted to have up to twice the reach for solutions created on the Power Platform, as opposed to those that are developed by an individual developer.
Fusion development in the Power Platform will be made easier through:
- Native Power Platform Visual Studio and VS Code integration
- Command-line interface (CLI) support for source code files and packaging
- Independent publisher connector capabilities
- Application lifecycle management (ALM) accelerator
Moreover, Power Virtual Agents now offers an improved chatbot builder experience, allowing people to make conversational AI agents without writing code in a much easier way. This is made possible through an integration with the Bot Framework Composer, which is now generally available, and it allows developers and business users to build bots through a collaborative process.
Event-driven dynamic dialogs can be created by users to handle interruptions and context switching, while developers can add adaptive cards to showcase interactive elements in the bot. The Bot Framework Composer also offers a visual editing canvas, tools to manage language understanding, a language generation system, and more. Notably, any custom dialogs that are added through the visual authoring tool do not require additional Azure hosting, since they are already deployed, hosted, and executed with all other bot content in the Power Virtual Agents service.