In this blog post, I’ll share 5 awesome tools with you that you can use to support your Power Platform development!
These tools will extend what you can do with your development, in comparison to how you work generally with the Power Platform User Interface. Whether that be making things faster by using a command line interface or using tools in XRMToolbox that provide a low code approach to something you’d need code for in Power Platform, hopefully these will help! 😉
XRMToolbox
The first tool I’d like to share is XRMToolbox. This is an app you can install on Windows that connects to Dataverse. This’ll mainly support with development of customisations for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement applications, Dataverse and model-driven app solutions.
This application comes with more than 100 tools in it’s tool library that let you do different things with Dataverse. Examples include tools that can do things such as identify active solution layers on objects in environments, create model-driven app notifications the low code way, produce FetchXML and loads more!
Visual Studio Code
The next tool I’d like to share is a code editor. This is just one example but you can take your pick of the many out there. The one I like to use and recommend is Visual Studio Code.
As much as Power Platform is a low-code development platform and the idea is to not have to do much work with code, there is still a bit if you’re wanting to take it past the basic limits 🙂
When you’re working with things like CLI, PowerShell, git, and other tools, having a code editor will come in super handy!
PnP PowerShell
If you work with the Microsoft 365 stack and do development in this area, you’ll almost certainly benefit from PnP PowerShell. I mainly use this when developing Power Platform solutions that rely on SharePoint as a data source. There’s a few cmdlets in PnP PowerShell that allow you to mirror a SharePoint site’s list schemas onto another site using Extract and Invoke templates.
You can check out how to use PnP PowerShell for the example above in my post here – Creating a SharePoint site using the configuration of another site with PnP Powershell
Power Platform CLI
Power Platform CLI is a simple developer command line interface allowing you to run various operations in Power Platform related to environments, authentication, solution packages, portals, code components, and more. To learn more about the Power Platform Command Line Interface, check out the 12-part series  below on working with it, with a relation to solutions.
Microsoft Graph Explorer
If in your solutions you generally have a need to work with data already inside your Microsoft 365 tenant, or your customers, which is almost 99.9% likely… you’ll find Microsoft Graph API to be an absolute lifesaver. But… what if you just want to play around with it, get a bit of understanding and see what the API can do. Well, this is where Graph Explorer comes in perfectly!
The Graph Explorer will let you do just that. It’ll even check out the request URL you provide it with or select from the examples, and then link you to docs at learn.microsoft.com so you can read more about what you’re doing!