What's new and planned for Fabric Developer Experiences in Microsoft Fabric
Important
The release plans describe functionality that may or may not have been released yet. The delivery timelines and projected functionality may change or may not ship. Refer to Microsoft policy for more information.
A core investment area in Microsoft Fabric is around our unified experiences across the platform. This includes shared user experiences for navigating around the product, managing content in workspaces, and developer tools for managing your projects. We plan to invest in areas to make it easier to get started building your projects, smooth out the collaboration experiences, and improve your ability to monitor and deploy projects.
Investment areas
Folders in workspace
Estimated release timeline: Q4 2024
Release Type: General availability
Folders in the workspace enables users to efficiently organize and manage items, making collaboration and content discovery easier.
Fabric workload developer kit
Estimated release timeline: Q4 2024
Release Type: General availability
This feature now extends to additional workloads and offers a robust developer toolkit for designing, developing, and interoperating with Microsoft Fabric using frontend SDKs and backend REST APIs. Introducing the Microsoft Fabric Workload Development Kit.
The Microsoft Fabric platform now provides a mechanism for ISVs and developers to integrate their new and existing applications natively into Fabric’s workload hub. This integration provides the ability to add net new capabilities to Fabric in a consistent experience without leaving their Fabric workspace, thereby accelerating data driven outcomes from Microsoft Fabric.
By downloading and leveraging the development kit, ISVs and software developers can build and scale existing and new applications on Microsoft Fabric and offer them via the Azure Marketplace without the need to ever leave the Fabric environment.
The development kit provides a comprehensive guide and sample code for creating custom item types that can be added to the Fabric workspace. These item types can leverage the Fabric frontend SDKs and backend REST APIs to interact with other Fabric capabilities, such as data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, visualization, and collaboration. You can also embed your own data application into the Fabric item editor using the Fabric native experience components, such as the header, toolbar, navigation pane, and status bar. This way, you can offer consistent and seamless user experience across different Fabric workloads.
Recommended task flow for Power BI workspaces
Estimated release timeline: Q4 2024
Release Type: Public preview
With a single click, you can create the recommended task flows for your Power BI workspaces, which only contain Power BI items in it. Creating task flow automatically assigns each item in your workspace to the relevant tasks. This allows you to view the relationships between tasks, filter the list of item types, and more easily locate, organize, and manage the items you created.
Power BI Embedded over Direct Lake
Estimated release timeline: Q4 2024
Release Type: Public preview
Power BI Embedded over Direct Lake mode semantic models is enabled, including full automation based on Fabric REST APIs. This allows ISVs to deploy and manage a solution, based on Direct Lake semantic models, to a very large number of their customer tenants. Direct Lake mode is a groundbreaking new engine capability to analyze very large datasets in Power BI. The technology is based on the idea of loading parquet-formatted files directly from a data lake, without having to query a Warehouse or SQL analytics endpoint, and without having to import or duplicate data into a Power BI semantic model. This native integration brings a unique mode of accessing the data from the Warehouse or SQL analytics endpoint, called Direct Lake. Direct Lake provides the most performant query and reporting experience. Direct Lake is a fast path to load the data from the data lake straight into the Power BI engine, ready for analysis. In traditional DirectQuery mode, the Power BI engine directly queries the data from the source for each query execution, and the query performance depends on the data retrieval speed. DirectQuery eliminates the need to copy data, ensuring that any changes in the source are immediately reflected in query results. In Import mode, the performance is better because the data is readily available in memory, without having to query the data from the source for each query execution. However, the Power BI engine must first copy the data into the memory, at data refresh time. Any changes to the underlying data source are picked up during the next data refresh. Direct Lake mode eliminates the Import requirement by loading the data files directly into memory. Because there's no explicit import process, it's possible to pick up any changes at the source as they occur. Direct Lake combines the advantages of DirectQuery and Import mode while avoiding their disadvantages. Direct Lake mode is the ideal choice for analyzing very large datasets and datasets with frequent updates at the source.
Fabric navigation experience improvements
Estimated release timeline: Q4 2024
Release Type: Public preview
Currently, users access various workloads—such as Power BI, Data Engineering, Data Warehouse, and Data Science—through the button in the lower-left corner. While this approach was intended to provide flexibility, we’ve heard that it can be confusing, leaving users uncertain about when and why to switch between workloads. Now, we’re refining how users open and interact with the product to simplify the workflow and make navigation more intuitive.
Git integration folders support
Estimated release timeline: Q4 2024
Folder support with Git integration will empower users to uphold their folder structure consistently across both the Fabric workspace and the connected Git repository. Modifications to workspace folders containing Fabric items will be accurately mirrored in both platofrms, facilitating seamless synchronization between Git and Fabric, even when handling intricate folder hierarchies.
Allow multiple schedulers on a single item
Estimated release timeline: Q1 2025
Release Type: Public preview
We plan to allow multiple schedulers to be created and used in the same item. Each of these schedulers operates separately and independently of others. You can make different job schedule plans for the same item based on different business requirements. We will support API first, with UX following soon after.
Job scheduler supports user-assigned managed identity
Estimated release timeline: Q1 2025
Release Type: Public preview
Supporting user-assigned managed identities enhances security, flexibility, and control over job scheduling activities. We plan to add the API support first and then enable this to the UI.
Service principal support for GitHub
Estimated release timeline: Q1 2025
Release Type: General availability
Fabric Git integration will support using service principals across the full set of Fabric Git REST APIs when working with GitHub, enabling complete automation of Git workflows. Support for service principal with Azure DevOpss will follow.
Improve quick access visibility on Home
Estimated release timeline: Q1 2025
Release Type: Public preview
The Quick Access section on Fabric Home is crucial for users to quickly get to their items and workspaces. Currently, its visibility is poor because it is located at the bottom of the page, and the 'Learn More' cards are taking a lot of real estates. We aim to improve the visibility and usability of the Quick Access section to make it more useful.
Add job capacity information in Monitor Hub
Estimated release timeline: Q1 2025
Release Type: General availability
We’re introducing a new “Capacity” column for all item types in the Monitor Hub to help users gain a clearer understanding of how capacity is being utilized. When you experience a “capacity throttle” in the future, you’ll be able to refer to the Monitor Hub for insights and clues that may help in diagnosing the issue.
Deployment pipelines Fabric APIs Phase II
Estimated release timeline: Q1 2025
Release Type: General availability
In line with Fabric alignment, we are finalizing the public APIs for the Deployment pipelines on the Fabric platform, following the initial batch of APIs released in May 2024. While the May release provided the ability to retrieve existing deployment pipeline details and stages, the upcoming release will introduce APIs for their modification, workspace addition/removal, access control, and administrative tasks. The complete list is provided below.
Add Deployment Pipeline Role Assignment Delete Deployment Pipeline Role Assignment Get Deployment Pipeline Role Assignments Create Deployment Pipeline Delete Deployment Pipeline Update Deployment Pipeline Assign Workspace To Stage Unassign Workspace From Stage
- Add deployment options to Deploy API
Get Deployment Pipeline Operation Get Deployment Pipeline Operations Admin: List Deployment Pipelines Admin: Add Deployment Pipeline Role Assignment Admin: Delete Deployment Pipeline Role Assignment Admin: Get Deployment Pipeline Role Assignments
Terraform provider for Fabric
Estimated release timeline: Q1 2025
Release Type: General availability
Terraform, as a powerful Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool, can create and manage a wide range of cloud resources thanks to its extensive support for various providers. Providers in Terraform are plugins that enable it to work with virtually any platform or service that has an accessible API. This flexibility allows users to define and provision infrastructure across different environments seamlessly.
Terraform provider for Fabric empowers users to automate and streamline their deployment and management processes in a declarative manner. With the Terraform Provider for Microsoft Fabric, users can:
- Enhance Governance and Compliance: Establish and enforce processes, mitigate risks, identify and rectify infrastructure drifts, use policies for compliance, approve modifications, and track update history.
- Automate Complex Deployments: Simplify and templatize repetitive tasks, apply changes across multiple environments, and provision environments for various application development stages (Dev, Test, Prod, Pipelines) or common use cases like copilots.
- Manage Ephemeral Environments: Create and destroy temporary development/test environments as needed, ensuring greater consistency between production and development setups.
- Enable Cross-Tenant Resource Copying: Facilitate the copying of environmental resources across non-production tenants for development purposes within enterprises.
- Accelerate Infrastructure Setup: Speed up the setup of complex self-hosted products within customer tenants.
- Manage Partner Tenants: Initialize and manage tenants for business partners, such as dealerships and franchises.
Shipped feature(s)
Improve '+New' experience in workspace: Item grouped by JTBD
Shipped (Q4 2024)
Release Type: General availability
Current the +New dropdown in workspace is a long and flat list. We kept getting feedback from customers that they expect items to be grouped by JTBD so that they can easily find them. We also add the capability to let user favourite the item types for quick create.
Deployment pipelines new UI
Shipped (Q3 2024)
Release Type: Public preview
As Deployment pipelines evolve into a platform tool (fabric’s), it necessitates modifications in its current design to accommodate Fabric from various angles such as UX alignments, scalability, and advanced features, among others. The new UI of Deployment pipelines introduce a fresh user interface for the creation process and the pipeline’s main page, along with some UX improvements. There’s also a shift in the deployment operation where instead of deploying to the next stage, you’re now deploying to your current stage. Other than that, all functionalities have stayed the same so anything you can do in the original UI you can do with the new UI.
Fabric Core REST APIs support Service Principal
Shipped (Q3 2024)
Release Type: General availability
Enablement of Service Principal support in Microsoft Fabric REST API is a pivotal enhancement for the automation of customers deployment and management of environments.The ability to manage principal permissions for Fabric workspaces, as well as the creation and management of Fabric artifacts like eventhouse and lakehouse, is crucial for the automation of provisioning workflows. By end of July 2024, Service Principal will already be supported by few automation scenarios, such as Fabric Workspace management, Power BI Report management, Power BI Semantic Models management and Fabric Capacity.
Fabric Terraform Provider
Shipped (Q3 2024)
Release Type: Public preview
Utilizing the Terraform Provider for Fabric enables users to automate and streamline deployment and management processes in a declarative manner. This ensures that deployments and management tasks are executed accurately and consistently, thereby reducing manual errors. Fabric Terraform Provider will help you with:
- Keep track of all changes in source version control solutions, like Azure DevOps, GitHub.
- Enable DevOps processes by implementing testing and validation strategies before deploying to production.
- Enhance scalability and flexibility for deployments.
- Boost the speed and reliability of deployments. Solution and Customer Use Cases: Fabric Terraform Provider enables customers to manage Fabric Workspace and Items deployment. Fabric Terraform Provider is designed to address the following customer use cases and friction points when trying to deploy, manage, and govern Fabric entities on scale: Governance and Compliance: by establishing processes and enforcing policies that mitigate risk and help them to ensure compliance, approve modifications, and keep track of update history. IaC also uses service principal identities to implement least privilege administration and automation. Infrastructure for ALM: To facilitate agile development, enterprise need to create and destroy ephemeral dev/test workspaces as needed. Managing this process through IaC helps customers achieve greater consistency between production and development workspaces.
This provider includes essential resources for managing Fabric workspaces and items.
Workspace Management: This resource enables users to create, edit, and delete Fabric workspaces, as well as manage workspace role assignments. Item Management: These resources enable users to perform CRUD operations on Items within Fabric workspaces.
Workspace filters/search support nested folders
Shipped (Q3 2024)
Release Type: Public preview
This feature provides user capability to filer/search by keyword in entire workspace or entire folder including all its children.
GitHub and GitHub Enterprise support
Shipped (Q3 2024)
Release Type: Public preview
Fabric Git integration is broadening its compatibility by adding support for GitHub as a provider. Given GitHub's widespread adoption as a leading source control tool, this expansion will grant organizations relying on GitHub the opportunity to harness Fabric Git integration, ensuring synchronization between their fabric workspaces and Git repositories. GitHub will come in the addition to the existing Azure DevOps support, offering all of the same familiar tools and capabilities. Developers will have the ability to connect to GiHub using their personal access tokens, ensuring a precise connection for each developer. GitHub Enterprise Cloud will also be supported, excluding the use of specific allowed IP adresses and private links.
Git integration - enhanced branching capabilities
Shipped (Q3 2024)
Release Type: Public preview
This update to Fabric Git integration introduces enhanced branch-related capabilities, providing users with a seamless method to work in isolation, an essential aspect of any workflow. This release encompasses several improvements to the connection between Fabric and Git branches:
- Branching Out to New Workspace: Users can effortlessly branch out to new work environments with just a few clicks. This feature facilitates the creation of a new workspace synced with a corresponding new branch, ready for developers to begin their work. Once tasks are completed, merging back can easily be done via the existing Git workflow. This ensures isolation and streamlines the developers' work process.
- Contextual Workspace Navigation: To streamline navigation between related workspaces, a "related branches" section is added to the source control pane. This area displays any connected workspaces sharing the same Git connection, allowing users to seamlessly transition between them. This functionality enhances workflow continuity and aids in maintaining context within Fabric.
- Improved Source Control Pane Structure: The Git source control pane is redesigned for enhanced usability. It will feature separate tabs for managing changes and updates, branch-related actions and navigation, and additional tabs planned for future updates. This restructuring aims to simplify interaction with the source control pane, providing users with a more intuitive experience.
Enable users to adjust list column width in workload home, browse and workspace view
Shipped (Q2 2024)
Release Type: General availability
Currently the columns in Fabric workload home, browse and workspace page cannot be expanded to display full object name. The maximum width allowed for the name column is determined by the screen width.
This feature improves the column width resizing experience and allow users to set up unlimited column width. And at same time, ensure a non-broken experience of the table and other columns.
.NET SDK for Fabric REST APIs
Shipped (Q2 2024)
Release Type: Public preview
The Fabric REST API provides developers with programmatic access to manage and interact with Microsoft Fabric resources. It enables developers to automate a wide array of tasks, including data integration, data warehousing, big data analytics, deployment process automation, new tenant provisioning, and more. The .NET SDK is a wrapper library that simplifies the communication with the Fabric REST API and handles the authentication, serialization, and error handling for you. The .NET SDK for Fabric REST API exposes the following endpoints:
- Capacities: List capacities
- Workspaces: Create, update, delete, or list Microsoft Fabric workspaces.
- Items: Create, update, delete, or list Microsoft Fabric items.
- Git: Commit to Git, Connect and Disconnect workspace to Git and update workspace from Git.
- Long running operations: get operation status and get operation result.
- OneLake shortcuts: Create, delete and get shortcut
Fabric Core REST API generally available
Shipped (Q2 2024)
Release Type: General availability
Fabric Core REST APIs are now generally available. This marks a significant milestone in the evolution of Microsoft Fabric, a platform that has been meticulously designed to empower developers and businesses alike with a comprehensive suite of tools and services. The Core REST APIs are the backbone of Microsoft Fabric, providing the essential building blocks for a myriad of functionalities within the platform. They are designed to improve efficiency, reduce manual effort, increase accuracy, and lead to faster processing times. These APIs help scale operations more easily and efficiently as the volume of work grows, automate repeatable processes with consistency, and enable integration with other systems and applications, providing a streamlined and efficient data pipeline. The Microsoft Fabric Core REST APIs cover a broad spectrum of functionalities, including: Workspace management: APIs for handling workspace operations, including permission management. Item management: APIs enabling the creation, retrieval, update, and deletion of items, with upcoming plans for enhanced support in data source discovery and granular permissions management. Item defintion: Ability to create, retrieve, and update definitions for various items such as Semantic Model, Report, Notebook, SJD, and Data Pipeline. With these APIs, developers can exercise precise control over their deployment processes by effortlessly adjusting parameters such as semantic model configurations or report themes before publishing. Leveraging Microsoft Fabric REST APIs facilitates seamless project deployment through REST API calls. Additionally, the APIs offer functionalities for job and tenant management, streamlining operations within the platform. For developers eager to explore the details of Microsoft Fabric Core APIs, comprehensive documentation is readily available. This documentation includes usage guidelines, illustrative examples, and articles housed in a centralized repository for easy accessibility and discoverability.The documentation is continuously updated to reflect the latest features and improvements, ensuring that developers have the most current information at their fingertips. To learn more, see Fabric REST API docs
Fabric workload developer kit
Shipped (Q2 2024)
Release Type: Public preview
This feature now extends to additional workloads and offers a robust developer toolkit for designing, developing, and interoperating with Microsoft Fabric using frontend SDKs and backend REST APIs. Introducing the Microsoft Fabric Workload Development Kit.
The Microsoft Fabric platform now provides a mechanism for ISVs and developers to integrate their new and existing applications natively into Fabric’s workload hub. This integration provides the ability to add net new capabilities to Fabric in a consistent experience without leaving their Fabric workspace, thereby accelerating data driven outcomes from Microsoft Fabric.
By downloading and leveraging the development kit, ISVs and software developers can build and scale existing and new applications on Microsoft Fabric and offer them via the Azure Marketplace without the need to ever leave the Fabric environment.
The development kit provides a comprehensive guide and sample code for creating custom item types that can be added to the Fabric workspace. These item types can leverage the Fabric frontend SDKs and backend REST APIs to interact with other Fabric capabilities, such as data ingestion, transformation, orchestration, visualization, and collaboration. You can also embed your own data application into the Fabric item editor using the Fabric native experience components, such as the header, toolbar, navigation pane, and status bar. This way, you can offer consistent and seamless user experience across different Fabric workloads.
Persistent filters in workspaces
Shipped (Q1 2024)
Currently, the workspace filters aren't persistent. You must reapply filters each time upon returning to the workspace. We heard your feedback and plan to enable persistent filters for improved navigation.
Customizable left navigation bar
Shipped (Q1 2024)
We learned from you that the frequently used capabilities vary for everyone based on their roles and job to be done during a certain period time. To better improve productivity, we plan to make the left navigation bar customizable. You can pin or unpin an entry point on the left navigation bar according to your own preferences.
Parent-child items in workspaces
Shipped (Q4 2023)
Some Fabric items have children items such as Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, etc. This feature enables you to easily view the parent-child items relationship in workspace UI and also makes the items list cleaner.