Release Power BI via Azure DevOps extension

Case
This month Microsoft released a new DevOps extenstion for Power BI: Power BI automation tools. How can you use this?

Power BI automation tools in DevOps

Solution
The DevOps support for releasing Power BI reports, datasets and datafows was almost non existing. You can release those assets with Azure DevOps, but you need a lot of Rest APIs and even more PowerShell code. There are a few third party / open source addons, but adding those to DevOps is not always permitted by companies. An other issue is that most of them are very basic and not sufficient for all requirements.

Now Microsoft finally released its own Power BI extenstion for DevOps that shoud convince most companies to install this add on to Azure DevOps. To use this new extension go to the Marketplace and click on the Get it free button. If you have sufficient rights in DevOps then you can select the project to add this extension to. Note that it is still in Public Preview.

There is one more downside for those without a PBI Premium license. It uses the Power BI Deployment Pipelines which is a Premium feature. For those unlucky ones there is still the Rest API/PowerShell solution.

Hopefully this new extension will combine the Power of DevOps, which is often already used by companies, with the release features of Power BI. In this new series of posts we will show both solutions and compare them.