Powershell to create a Canvas PowerApps Component Skeleton

Microsoft has released a PowerApps Component Framework (PCF), to allow custom components to be created for PowerApps. The framework was quite expected by the community and a number of projects already started to create a number of components, for example: PCF Gallery.

As developers, we tend to jump on such new frameworks and start playing around. If you are like me, every time you discover a better way to do something you try it out on the existing code but when it works you create a new project and re-code it to always have a clean solution. You end up with a lot of projects and repeating the setup steps over and over again.

To avoid having to repeat the project setup steps. A number of Powershell scripts were created. The create scripts takes a number of parameters:

  • The name of the Solution
  • The namespace to be used by the solution
  • Under which Publisher name the solution will be released
  • The prefix used by the publisher
  • [Optionally] A list of component names that will form part of the solution. If the value is not supplied a component with the name of the Solution suffixed with “Component” is created.

Adding of Components after a solution was created another script is provided. The script accepts the component name and the node extensions to be installed.

Disclaimer: The scripts are designed to be self-contained and to perform the required steps for setting up a PCF project based on the Experimental Preview available at 8th November 2019.