Everything as Code - ALM with Canvas Apps

With the recent experimental announcement of the PowerApps Solution Packager, we now have a much better way of managing Canvas Apps in your source code repository. This moves us much closer to a better ALM story for the whole of the Power Platform so that my top 3 principles can be followed:

1. Everything as code – The single point of truth for all artifacts (solution metadata, apps, code, data, versioning, releases) should be under source control.
2. Environments as cattle, not pets – When the entire solution is under source control, environments can be built and deleted for specific purposes – e.g. features, experiments, testing. I wrote a recent post on this.
3. Define your Branching Strategy – A branching strategy is defined as describing how features/releases are represented as branches. Each time a new feature (or group of linked features) is worked on, it should happen in a source code branch. Code can be merged between each branch when ready to be integrated, built and released. Branches normally would have an associated PowerPlatform environment to allow you to work in parallel to other changes without the risk of introducing changes that should not be released. The gitflow branching strategy is a great starting point to use.

The Power Apps Solution Packager (pasopa) brings us closer to the 'everything as code' mantra - by unpacking a Canvas App into source code files that allow you to merge in changes from other branches and then re-pack. Eventually, this will make its way into the Power Apps CLI and Solution Packager.

Here are a couple of videos I've done on the subject of the PowerApps Solution Packager:

• ▶ Canvas Apps As Code??! Power Platform Unpacked #10
• ▶ Managing Canvas Apps as Source Code using Branches and Pull Requests