Daniel Marsh-Patrick
Daniel Marsh-Patrick

Deneb 1.3 Initial Beta Available

Since I’ve last posted about the 1.1. beta, I’ve had my head down and kind of forgotten to blog further… sorry about that! We’ve since seen version 1.2 of Deneb go live in AppSource. This contained a few enhancements, notably Cross-Highlighting support.

Version 1.3 has been available through the Alpha Channel for the last couple of weeks, but I’m now ready to make it available for beta testing for folks who are interested in doing so. As there’s been some changes to the UI and underlying editor logic, I recommend that you do, in order to make sure that nothing breaks for you and help me shore-up any issues before I submit to AppSource (which is a lengthy remediation process if we do find anything after then).

What’s In 1.3?

The change log in the documentation site’s 1.3 staging area gives you much more information. How you can access that is coming up in a moment, but here’s a high-level list to whet your appetite:

  • Debug Area added, which provides information about the dataset and signals.
  • pbiColor expression for accessing individual theme colours.
  • Ability to generate embedded base64 preview images for templates.
  • Multiple visual cross-filter/highlight support.
  • Vega updated to 5.22.1.
  • UI rendering improvements.

How Can I Learn About the Changes?

The documentation site (deneb-viz.github.io) allows you to select your desired version, and you’ll be able to view the documentation for the current version in-progress by selecting it from the top-right, e.g.:

The documentation website allows you to select the version in development to read about new functionality

…or if you’d prefer, here’s a direct link to the /next version.

The recommended place to start is the Change Log, which summarises all changes currently in the beta, as well as providing links to the relevant documentation (within this version’s workspace) where you can learn more about it.

What Else Do I Need to Know?

Like the Alpha Channel Build, the Beta is not supported for production use, and is a means for early adopters to test and feed back on intended changes. I really value any and all feedback that you can offer, as it helps all users of Deneb to have a better development experience.

As I’m handling the development of Deneb myself, I’m also primarily responsible for a lot of the testing, and this means I can’t catch everything. I’ve tested and verified 1.3 functionality in a lot of my existing visual projects, but I’d strongly recommend that you try this with your awesome creations to ensure that everything works how you expect, and if not then we can do hopefully do something about that before we submit to AppSource.

If you spot any problems or something doesn’t work for you, please don’t assume that someone else has mentioned it already. Please raise anything in the GitHub repository and I’ll investigate as soon as I can.

More about this, and the process (including how to get and install, and what to do if you have issues) can be read on the Early Access Builds page on the updated website.

How to Download?

The download details are on the Early Access Builds page on the updated website.

I’m always excited when a new version is (nearly) ready to go, and I’m really hoping that these changes will keep improving the development experience for you. I’m now looking at getting started with developing 1.4, which should see even more productivity enhancements, as well as some more integration with Power BI’s features.

As ever, thanks so much for reading, and for using Deneb. It’s been amazing seeing what you’ve been able to do inside Power BI with the Vega languages, and long may it continue!

All the best,

DM-P

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