FabCon 2024: three announcements that matter for Power BI and Fabric developers

The first Microsoft Fabric Community Conference opened in Las Vegas today, and Arun Ulag published the official list of announcements to go with it. The list is long, covering CI/CD, data ingestion, security, governance, shortcuts, Power BI visuals and Copilot.

Most of it will not change how you work next Monday. A few items will. If you build semantic models, reports or data platforms on Fabric, these are the three I would pay attention to.

1. CI/CD grows beyond reports and semantic models

Until now, Git integration and deployment pipelines in Fabric have been most useful for Power BI items. Anyone who has tried to put a whole Fabric solution under source control has run into the gaps.

The announcement says Microsoft is "transforming Microsoft Fabric's CI/CD experience". The concrete pieces are:

• Git integration and deployment pipelines extended to data pipelines and data warehouses.
• Spark job definitions and Spark environments added to Git integration.
• The ability to branch out a Git-connected workspace in a few clicks.
• APIs for both Fabric Git integration and deployment pipelines, so teams on tools like Azure DevOps can automate the flow.

These are announced for a preview experience in early April, so they are not in your tenant yet. But the direction is clear: the whole workspace, not only the Power BI part, is meant to live in Git.

The branching feature is the one I am most curious about. Working on a feature in an isolated workspace, then merging back, is how most software teams already work. Power BI developers have mostly had to fake it with copies of PBIX files and naming conventions.

Related, the March Power BI feature summary notes a change you will see in your repositories. The two system files Fabric generated per item, item.metadata.json and item.config.json, are consolidated into a single .platform file. Your next commit will include that update alongside your own changes, and exported projects need the latest Power BI Desktop to open.

2. Copilot can write and explain DAX in DAX query view

DAX query view arrived in public preview in November 2023. With the March 2024 Power BI Desktop update, it now has Copilot built in, also in public preview.

According to the feature summary, you enable it under File, Options and settings, Options, in the Preview features section. You then open Copilot from the ribbon or with Ctrl+I inside DAX query view. It can:

• Generate DAX queries from natural language.
• Explain DAX queries and functions.
• Help with specific DAX topics.

This is not Copilot building your measures for you. It works in the query view, where you test and inspect your model. That is a sensible place for it, because a wrong query costs you a few seconds, not a broken report in production.

The same release also adds three new INFO functions in DAX query view: INFO.STORAGETABLECOLUMNS(), INFO.STORAGETABLECOLUMNSEGMENTS() and INFO.STORAGETABLES(). If you document or audit models, those are worth a look on their own.

3. Live editing of Direct Lake models from Power BI Desktop is on the roadmap

This one is a statement of direction, not a shipped feature. The announcement says: "Later in the year, we will release the ability to live edit Direct Lake semantic models" in the Fabric service from Power BI Desktop.

Why does it matter? Direct Lake is one of the main reasons to put Power BI on top of a Fabric lakehouse or warehouse. Many experienced model developers do their best work in Power BI Desktop, and today that is not where you edit a Direct Lake model live.

Being able to open a Direct Lake model from Desktop and edit it live would remove a real friction point. Until it ships, I would not plan a project around it. I would plan for it, though, by keeping model design decisions documented, so moving between tools later is painless.

Smaller items worth a note

A few other announcements are small but practical for developers and workspace owners:

• Workspace folders are in preview, so you can finally organise a crowded workspace.
• Multiple apps per workspace and item tags are listed as coming soon.
• Task flows were shown as a sneak peek: a visual map of a data project from end to end.
• A semantic model refresh activity in data pipelines is in preview, which helps when a refresh must run right after a load.
• Power BI Report Builder can now connect to new data sources such as Snowflake and Databricks through Get Data and Power Query Online.

What to do next

A short list for the coming weeks:

1. Update Power BI Desktop and switch on the DAX query view Copilot preview in a test model. Ask it to explain a query you already understand, and check the answer.
2. Look at your Git-connected workspaces. Expect the .platform file change in your next commit, and tell your team before it confuses anyone in a pull request.
3. When the CI/CD preview lands in April, test branching on a non-critical workspace. Note what is and is not supported for your item types.
4. If you build on Direct Lake, keep an eye on the Desktop editing feature, but do not wait for it.
5. Start using workspace folders in a sandbox before rolling a folder convention out to production workspaces.

Takeaway

After two decades in data, I tend to judge a conference by what changes in the daily work of the people building things. On that measure, FabCon 2024 delivers mostly on CI/CD and on developer tooling around DAX, with Direct Lake in Desktop as the promise to watch.

None of this is GA yet, so test before you commit. Which of the three would make the biggest difference in your current projects?

Sources

• Announcements from the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference (Microsoft Fabric blog)
• Power BI March 2024 Feature Summary (Power BI blog)