PowerApps builder in Visual Studio

[tism]

Would love to see the ability to design PowerApps forms in Visual Studio or something similar - would be great for editing more advanced/complex forms, and have the ability to set up the design surface that best suits individual designers.  It would also give us a decent code editor.  The whole "Office UI" paradigm (with the "File" backstage) is great for Word and Excel, but clunky and not really developer friendly.

[Shaibal13]

Yes, PowerApps builder in Visual Studio is a must for developing high-end complex form designs that's never possible with the existing UI design. This will provide great boost for Visual Studio and PowerApps both.

[Anonymous]

That's probably never going to happen given the audience for powerapps is the power user/citzen developer. 

Have you looked at Azure Logic Apps in Visual Studio? PowerApps is Azure Logic Apps under the hood, so is kind of the "complex" powerapps you're asking for already.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/quickstart-create-logic-apps-with-visual-studio

[ocdc2008]

I agree with this post. I am not a software developer by trade, but I am building pretty complex apps and would LOVE if I didn't have to use the PowerApps UI. It gets very slow with not much complexity. It ignores key strokes while its "thinking" which is does every half second or so. I end up typing something like:

selectedProperty.ID

PowerApps will show that text, but there will be errors evaluated. Being naturally confused, I'll go looking elsewhere for the problem. Only to come back to the field and find that it only took:

selectedPropert

Leaving off the rest of what I typed because the UI interrupted my keystrokes. VERY ANNOYING.

Perhaps, like Excel, there could be a "Application.Calculation = false" option so I can manually refresh the calculation in the app while I'm building. This would make life SO much easier in PowerApps.

[Anonymous]

Why anyone uses the visual studio to develop anything for PowerApps? Point of the PowerApps to move away from Visual Studio to develop business applications!