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Imagine using GitHub with a Canvas app. And I mean using GitHub as it was meant to be used, with text diffs between versions, and not just storing opaque .msapp blobs. Teams can collaborate on apps: they can work on private branches, diff changes, create pull requests for review, and merge into master.

Visual Studio Code, installed; A basic understanding of Git concepts and commands, such as working with repositories, forks, clones, and branches, staging and unstaging changes, and pushing commits. You need a GitHub account. About Visual Studio Code. Built on open source. Runs everywhere. Go beyond syntax highlighting and autocomplete with IntelliSense, which provides smart completions based on variable types, function definitions, and imported modules. Visual Studio Code, also known as VS Code, is a trendy open-source code editor built by Microsoft Inc. It comes up with some built-in powerful features like integrated terminal, embedded Git control, code snippets, syntax highlighting, auto-completion of code, code debugging, and so on.

Imagine using Visual Studio Code with a Canvas app, a full screen editor with search and replace.

We are very pleased to announce the experimental release of a tool that enables these modern miracles. It is but the first step as we make application lifecycle management easier for formulas and Canvas apps.

To illustrate, in this short video we will change the Icon property of an Icon control with these steps:

Export an app as an .msapp file with Save As.
Unpack the .msapp to individual source files using our new tool.
Make a simple change to a formula using Visual Studio Code.
Pack the modified source files back into an .msapp file.
Open the modified .msapp file in Studio and see the result of my change.

This new tool enables the source code of a Canvas app to be effectively managed in GitHub or Azure DevOps. Diffs, pull requests, and comments can be based on lines of formula text rather than .msapp blob files.

In this next example, we’ll make the same change to the Canvas app stored in GitHub as text source code files. We’ll go through all the steps required to manage the change, have it reviewed, commented on, merged in to master, and the result tested.

We’ll work with this GitHub repo in Visual Studio Code. First we’ll create a new branch, make modifications there (change the icon from “Person” to “People”), and push the changes to our new branch on GitHub.

Back on GitHub, we’ll create a pull request for this new branch to merge into master. We’ll have an opportunity to review the one line change, to comment on the change, and to approve the merge. Canvas apps become a part of your existing application lifecycle management workflow.

And after the merge has been made, we sync changes back to our client and recreate the .msapp file. We can now load the file into Power Apps Studio and see our change.

Excited? These examples only scratches the surface of what is possible. By supporting text files, all the tools that you love and all the unique workflows that you have created can now be used with Canvas apps too.

Limitations

But before you get too excited, let’s reiterate that this is experimental. We are making this available now for your feedback and to find issues.

Please do not convert all your .msapp files to source files and throw away the originals. We are working toward a day when you can do this, but that is not today. By far, Power Apps Studio is still the best place to edit a Canvas app. We are introducing a new way to manage and edit Canvas apps, a companion to Studio, not a replacement.

There are some known limitations and gotchas:

Outside of Studio, don’t add a control with the same name as one that already exists. This can happen easily if two different authors use Power Apps Studio to add a button control, resulting in two different Button1 controls. When collaborating with others, we recommend renaming controls to something appropriate and hopefully unique within the app.
The source code file may expose options that Studio does not. For example, the ZIndex property is exposed on controls. In Studio, this isn’t a full fledged property and can only be moved up or down with a static value. If you put a formula here, the app may not operate properly.

Distribution

So, how do you get the cool PASopa tool used above? To download and use:

Install .NET Core 3.1.x (x64).
Clone the repo at https://github.com/microsoft/PowerApps-Language-Tooling
Run build.cmd in the root directory.
You can find PASopa.exe and needed dependencies in the binDebugPASopa directory.

More details on building are available in the GitHub readme.

I did say this was experimental. 🙂 This isn’t going to be for everyone at this time and that is OK. At this early juncture we are looking for savvy early adopters that can give us good feedback on the directory structure and file format. Eventually we will be integrating this directly with the Power Apps CLI and it can be run by anyone without needing to do a build. PASopa is just a test harness that we are using in the meantime.

We are releasing this tool as open source, and that will still be true even after we integrate with the Power Apps CLI. We’d love your feedback and issue reports directly through GitHub. Eventually, we will also welcome your pull requests, but are limiting outside contributions until we are better established.

YAML File Format

We adopted a subset of YAML as our file format. Our first priority was a format that was super easy to read and write by humans. Ciao bella mac download. But we also wanted something that could be embedded in other places within the Power Platform, and many of them use YAML already or are considering this move. We wanted to leverage existing libraries and tools and not create something completely new.

There are three unique aspects to how we embed within YAML:

All formulas start with a leading =. Just like Excel, the = introduces a formula rather than a static value. We don’t make you write the leading equals in Power Apps Studio but if you notice the formula bar it is always there. The leading = also helped us avoid the normal data type interpretation that YAML does for static value, that is not appropriate for formulas.
Some formulas must be expressed in YAML multi-line. Using the leading = helps us a great deal, but it doesn’t address everything. If you have a formula that contains a string with an embedded #, it is interpreted by YAML as the start of a comment, and the rest of the line will be truncated. In these cases, the formula must be expressed using YAML’s multi-line facilities, most likely being a variant of the | syntax.
Controls are typed with the As keyword. Normally YAML has only a single name to the left of the : when providing a property value. But there is nothing to say that left hand side can’t be more complex and we are taking advantage of this to not only name the property but also provide its type. We know our use of As here is different from how we use it in ForAll and other record scope functions, and we considered lots of other alternatives, but the resounding feedback from early reviews was to stick with what Visual Basic used.

Full details on the file format are available in docs included in the GitHub repo.

Note that we support only a very specific subset of YAML. Properties with static values, such as trying to set Size: 24 (without a leading =) won’t work. We also deliberately avoided YAML line comments that start with a # because of the confusion they can cause. Over time and based on your feedback we may support more YAML, but for now, it is very restrictive and that is by design.

Here is a simple example form the Hospital Emergency Response solution we shipped last spring. Note that as with all YAML, the indentation level indicates what is inside a container (SplashScreen in this case) and is also used for line continuation of the OnHidden property.

Directory Structure

Not everything gets the YAML treatment. There are a number of app resources and settings that retain their original not-meant-for-humans treatment and are not intended to be edited outside of Power Apps Studio. The full directory structure and how to deal with merge conflicts in other files is outlined in the GitHub readme.

For the simple one Icon control app that started this blog post, let’s walk through the files we find after PASopa -unpack has done it’s work.

First, let’s look at the files that are the most critical, that truly define the app. These should never be deleted and merges should be handled as you normally would in GitHub:

srcApp.pa.yaml – The *.pa.yaml files are where the formulas are located. This file contains the formulas associated with the app, such as App.OnStart. Since there is nothing set here, this file contains simply App As appinfo.
srcScreen1.pa.yaml – Control hierarchy and formulas for Screen1. Each screen is broken out individually into a separate file. In our case:

CanvasManifest.json – Information about the published app.
ComponentReferences.json – If this app used any components, they would be listed here. As it does not, it is empty: [ ]
Assetsresources.xml – Listing of resources embedded in the app. For this simple app it is empty: { “Resources”: [] }.
ConnectionsConnections.json – Listing of data sources in this app. For this simple app it is empty: { }.

Next comes files that are boiler plate, copied in when the app was created. Normally these will not change. If the Theme of the app is changed, the entire file will be swapped out.

Assetslogo.jpg – Logo for the app, referenced in CanvasManifest.json.
ControlTemplates.json – Information on three base classes used in this app, the Icon control, the Screen, and the App.
OtherReferencesTheme.json – Theme for the app. Each individual color and size is enumerated.
pkgsicon_2.3.0.xml – The control template for the one control we used, the Icon control.

Power Apps Studio maintains state between sessions, so you can get back to where you were These can be deleted at any time and are not a concern for merge conflicts.

srcEditorStateApp.editorstate.json – Information about the app.
srcEditorStateScreen1.editorstate.json – Same as App.editorstate.json, scoped to Screen1.

And finally, there are a set of files that the PASopa tool uses to ensure proper roundtripping of an app between .msapp and source files. It is safe to keep the latest version of these files if there is a merge conflict.

Otherchecksum.json – Checksums of the original files in the .msapp file. This file will not match the layout on the file system that -pack/-unpack read and write, it matches instead the zip file directory structure in the .msapp. This is used internally to detect differences to ensure we are roundtripping correctly.
Otherentropy.json – A file where we collect all the other bits of information that are needed for us to faithfully roundtrip the app, but can be easily ignored and/or deleted at any time.

Feedback

We are experimental. Have I mentioned that yet? 🙂 Now is the time to let us know what you think, now is the time to make any needed changes. Diablo 2 download free mac. Please use GitHub issues to the fullest, for comments, questions, actual issues, and any other feedback you may have.

Visual Studio Code has integrated source control management (SCM) and includes Git support in-the-box. Many other source control providers are available through extensions on the VS Code Marketplace.

Tip: Click on an extension tile to read the description and reviews in the Marketplace.

SCM Providers

VS Code has support for handling multiple Source Control providers simultaneously. For example, you can open multiple Git repositories alongside your Azure DevOps Server local workspace and seamlessly work across your projects. To turn on the Source Control Providers view, select the overflow menu in the Source Control view (⌃⇧G (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+G)), hover over Views, and make sure that Source Control Repositories is marked with a check. The Source Control Providers view shows the detected providers and repositories, and you can scope the display of your changes by selecting a specific provider.

SCM Provider extensions

If you would like to install another SCM provider, you can search on the scm providers extension category in the Extensions view (⇧⌘X (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+X)). Start typing '@ca' and you will see suggestions for extension categories like debuggers and linters. Select @category:'scm providers' to see available SCM providers.

Git support

VS Code ships with a Git source control manager (SCM) extension. Most of the source control UI and work flows are common across other SCM extensions, so reading about the general Git support in VS Code will help you understand how to use another provider.

Note: If you are new to Git, the git-scm website is a good place to start, with a popular online book, Getting Started videos and cheat sheets. The VS Code documentation assumes you are already familiar with Git.

Note: VS Code will leverage your machine's Git installation, so you need to install Git first before you get these features. Make sure you install at least version 2.0.0.

👉 When you commit, be aware that if your username and/or email is not set in your Git configuration, Git will fall back to using information from your local machine. You can find the details in Git commit information.

The Source Control icon in the Activity Bar on the left will always indicate an overview of how many changes you currently have in your repository. Selecting the icon will show you the details of your current repository changes: CHANGES, STAGED CHANGES and MERGE CHANGES.

Clicking each item will show you in detail the textual changes within each file. Note that for unstaged changes, the editor on the right still lets you edit the file: feel free to use it!

You can also find indicators of the status of your repository in the bottom-left corner of VS Code: the current branch, dirty indicators, and the number of incoming and outgoing commits of the current branch. You can checkout any branch in your repository by clicking that status indicator and selecting the Git reference from the list.

Tip: You can open VS Code in a sub-directory of a Git repository. VS Code's Git services will still work as usual, showing all changes within the repository, but file changes outside of the scoped directory are shaded with a tool tip indicating they are located outside the current workspace.

Commit

Staging (git add) and unstaging (git reset) can be done via contextual actions in the files or by drag-and-drop.

You can type a commit message above the changes and press Ctrl+Enter (macOS: ⌘+Enter) to commit them. If there are any staged changes, only changes will be committed. Otherwise, you'll get a prompt asking you to select what changes you'd like to commit and get the option to change your commit settings.

We've found this to be a great workflow. For example, in the earlier screenshot, only the staged changes to gulpfile.js will be included in the commit. A consecutive commit action could commit later changes to gulpfile.js, the deletion of yarn.lock, and changes to tests.js in a separate commit.

More specific Commit actions can be found in the Views and More Actions.. menu on the top of the Source Control view.

Tip: If you commit your change to the wrong branch, undo your commit using the Git: Undo Last Commit command in the Command Palette (⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P)).

Cloning a repository

If you haven't opened a folder yet, the Source Control view will give you the options to Open Folder from your local machine or Clone Repository.

If you select Clone Repository, you will be asked for the URL of the remote repository (for example on GitHub) and the parent directory under which to put the local repository.

For a GitHub repository, you would find the URL from the GitHub Code dialog.

You would then paste that URL into the Git: Clone prompt.

You'll also see the option to Clone from GitHub. Once you authenticate with your GitHub account in VS Code, you'll be able to search through repositories by name, and select any repo to clone it. You can also start the flow to clone a Git repository with the Git: Clone command in the Command Palette (⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P)). To see a step-by-step walkthrough, check out our Clone repos from VS Code video.

Branches and Tags

You can create and checkout branches directly within VS code through the Git: Create Branch and Git: Checkout to commands in the Command Palette (⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P)).

If you run Git: Checkout to, you will see a dropdown list containing all of the branches or tags in the current repository. It will also give you the option to create a new branch if you decide that's a better option, or checkout a branch in detached mode.

The Git: Create Branch command lets you quickly create a new branch. Just provide the name of your new branch and VS Code will create the branch and switch to it. If you choose to Create new branch from.., you'll get an extra prompt that allows you to specify which commit the new branch should be pointing to.

Remotes

Given that your repository is connected to some remote and that your checked out branch has an upstream link to a branch in that remote, VS Code offers you useful actions to push, pull, and sync that branch (the latter will run a pull command followed by a push command). You can find these actions in the Views and More Actions.. menu, along with the option to add or remove a remote.

VS Code is able to periodically fetch changes from your remotes. This enables VS Code to show how many changes your local repository is ahead or behind the remote. Starting with VS Code 1.19, this feature is disabled by default and you can use the git.autofetchsetting to enable it.

Tip: You should set up a credential helper to avoid getting asked for credentials every time VS Code talks to your Git remotes. If you don't do this, you may want to consider disabling automatic fetching via the git.autofetchsetting to reduce the number of prompts you get.

Git Status Bar actions

There is a Synchronize Changes action in the Status Bar, next to the branch indicator, when the current checked out branch has an upstream branch configured. Synchronize Changes will pull remote changes down to your local repository and then push local commits to the upstream branch.

If there is no upstream branch configured and the Git repository has remotes set up, the Publish action is enabled. This will let you publish the current branch to a remote.

Gutter indicators

If you open a folder that is a Git repository and begin making changes, VS Code will add useful annotations to the gutter and to the overview ruler.

A red triangle indicates where lines have been deleted
A green bar indicates new added lines
A blue bar indicates modified lines

Merge conflicts

Merge conflicts are recognized by VS Code. Differences are highlighted and there are inline actions to accept either one or both changes. Once the conflicts are resolved, stage the conflicting file so you can commit those changes.

Viewing diffs

Our Git tooling supports viewing of diffs within VS Code.

Tip: You can diff any two files by first right clicking on a file in the Explorer or OPEN EDITORS list and selecting Select for Compare and then right-click on the second file to compare with and select Compare with 'file_name_you_chose'. Alternatively from the keyboard hit ⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P) and select File: Compare Active File With and you will be presented with a list of recent files.

Build Vscode From Source

Diff editor review pane

There is a review pane in the Diff editor that presents changes in a unified patch format. You can navigate between changes with Go to Next Difference (F7) and Go to Previous Difference (⇧F7 (Windows, Linux Shift+F7)). Lines can be navigated with arrow keys and pressing Enter will jump back in the Diff editor and the selected line.

Note: This experience is especially helpful for screen reader users.

Timeline view

Visual Studio Code Source Code Control

The Timeline view, accessible at the bottom of the File Explorer by default, is a unified view for visualizing time-series events (for example, Git commits) for a file.

VS Code's built-in Git support provides the Git commit history of the specified file. Selecting a commit will open a diff view of the changes introduced by that commit. When you right-click on a commit, you'll get options to Copy Commit ID and Copy Commit Message.

Visual Studio Code supports more Git history workflows through extensions available on the VS Code Marketplace.

Tip: Click on an extension tile to read the description and reviews in the Marketplace.

Git output window

You can always peek under the hood to see the Git commands we are using. This is helpful if something strange is happening or if you are just curious. :)

To open the Git output window, run View > Output and select Git from the dropdown list.

Visual Studio Code No Source Code Providers Registered

Initialize a repository

If your workspace is on your local machine, you can enable Git source control by creating a Git repository with the Initialize Repository command. When VS Code doesn't detect an existing Git repository, the Source Control view will give you the options to Initialize Repository or Publish to GitHub.

You can also run the Git: Initialize Repository and Publish to GitHub commands from the Command Palette (⇧⌘P (Windows, Linux Ctrl+Shift+P)). Running Initialize Repository will create the necessary Git repository metadata files and show your workspace files as untracked changes ready to be staged. Publish to GitHub will directly publish your workspace folder to a GitHub repository, allowing you to choose between a private and public repositories. Check out our publishing repos video for more information about publishing to GitHub.

VS Code as Git editor

When you launch VS Code from the command line, you can pass the --wait argument to make the launch command wait until you have closed the new VS Code instance. This can be useful when you configure VS Code as your Git external editor so Git will wait until you close the launched VS Code instance.

Here are the steps to do so:

Make sure you can run code --help from the command line and you get help.
- if you do not see help, please follow these steps:
  - macOS: Select Shell Command: Install 'Code' command in path from the Command Palette.
  - Windows: Make sure you selected Add to PATH during the installation.
  - Linux: Make sure you installed Code via our new .deb or .rpm packages.
From the command line, run git config --global core.editor 'code --wait'

Now you can run git config --global -e and use VS Code as editor for configuring Git.

VS Code as Git diff tool

Add the following to your Git configurations to use VS Code as the diff tool:

This leverages the --diff option you can pass to VS Code to compare two files side by side.

To summarize, here are some examples of where you can use VS Code as the editor:

git rebase HEAD~3 -i do interactive rebase using VS Code
git commit use VS Code for the commit message
git add -p followed by e for interactive add
git difftool <commit>^ <commit> use VS Code as the diff editor for changes

Working with pull requests

Visual Studio Code also supports pull request workflows through the GitHub Pull Requests and Issues extension available on the VS Code Marketplace. Pull request extensions let you review, comment, and verify source code contributions directly within VS Code.

Next steps

Intro Video - Git Version Control - An introductory video providing an overview of VS Code Git support.
Basic Editing - Learn about the powerful VS Code editor.
Code Navigation - Move quickly through your source code.
Debugging - This is where VS Code really shines
Tasks - Running tasks with Gulp, Grunt, and Jake. Showing Errors and Warnings
Source Control API - If you want to integrate another Source Control provider into VS Code, see our Source Control API.

Common questions

I initialized my repo but the actions in the `..` menu are all grayed out

To push, pull, and sync you need to have a Git origin set up. You can get the required URL from the repository host. Once you have that URL, you need to add it to the Git settings by running a couple of command-line actions. For example:

My team is using Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) instead of Git. What should I do?

Use the Azure Repos extension and this will light up TFVC support.

Why do the Pull, Push and Sync actions never finish?

This usually means there is no credential management configured in Git and you're not getting credential prompts for some reason. Anaconda python 3.6 download mac.

You can always set up a credential helper in order to pull and push from a remote server without having VS Code prompt for your credentials each time.

How can I sign in to Git with my Azure DevOps organization that requires multi-factor authentication?

There are now Git credential helpers that assist with multi-factor authentication. You can download these from Git Credential Manager for Mac and Linux and Git Credential Manager for Windows.

I have GitHub Desktop installed on my computer but VS Code ignores it

VS Code only supports the official Git distribution for its Git integration.

I keep getting Git authentication dialogs whenever VS Code is running

VS Code automatically fetches changes from the server in order to present you with a summary of incoming changes. The Git authentication dialog is independent from VS Code itself and is a part of your current Git credential helper.

One way to avoid these prompts is to set up a credential helper that remembers your credentials.

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Another option is to disable the auto fetch feature by changing the following setting: 'git.autofetch': false.

Can I use SSH Git authentication with VS Code?

Github Vscode

Yes, though VS Code works most easily with SSH keys without a passphrase. If you have an SSH key with a passphrase, you'll need to launch VS Code from a Git Bash prompt to inherit its SSH environment.

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