What themes should we focus on in CLI for Microsoft 365 v4

[waldekmastykarz]

We're close to releasing a new major version of CLI for Microsoft 365 v4. What themes would you like us to explore/focus on in the coming year? Think about anything that would help you in your daily work: new commands for specific areas, new functionality, convenience, improvements, anything really that comes to mind. At this stage, we're looking for feedback and ideas so all opinions/judgements will be removed 😊

[nanddeepn]

Adding few commands related to License management might help. E.g. licenses assigned to a specific user.

[waldekmastykarz]

A while back we decommissioned the immersive mode and use non-immersive mode only. In this mode, for each command, CLI starts, executes the command and stops. It would be interesting to research if we could speed it up by bundling up CLI core. Node’s require is pretty slow and bundling all files that are a part of the each start could theoretically make a big difference.

[appieschot]

I see a lot of things happening around the Power Platform stuff; we should consolidate our 'environment' commands and perhaps introduce a powerplatform service as opposed to flow / powerapp specific environments. And since there is a lot of new functionality around deployments / components we should have a look at those as well.

[waldekmastykarz]

We have plenty of commands that allow you to retrieve items only by ID, which users are unlikely to know and need to look up first, which is inconvenient. We should extending all commands with options that allow you to retrieve items using human-readable values like display name.

[waldekmastykarz]

When running a command, if you don't specify a required option, the command fails with an error. What if instead, it would show you a prompt to provide the value? This is similar to how required options work in PowerShell.

[waldekmastykarz]

In all commands ensure that you can refer to the object by ID for best performance but also by a value that users are likely to know, like name, title, etc

[waldekmastykarz]

Since we now use Microsoft Graph typings, we should update all commands and replace our own interfaces with those from the typings package to remove the unnecessary code.

[appieschot]

Today I had to run some reports against two different tenants at the same time (or at least during the same day). I was wondering if we could allow for setting multiple contexts in the CLI so you could run reporting on the same time. Its a bit of an edge case so I am not sure if we should do this but I might not be the only one who has this issue so let us know!

[waldekmastykarz]

MSAL supports signing in with multiple accounts so we could totally do it. You might think of it as profiles that you can switch between without having to sign out and in. Could be very useful for folks who work with multiple accounts.

[vipulkelkar]

Should we consider #2130 : "identify commands to refactor to async"

[waldekmastykarz]

Certainly! Especially if it can help simplify our code it would be beneficial to lower the maintenance effort and give us time back to spend on adding enhancements and new features.

[waldekmastykarz]

For the v4, we identified the following projects that we'd like to pursue:

• app commands
• ease of use/convenience, for example:
  • get everything by name
  • prompt for required options missing
  • context
• new output types, for example:
  • csv (DONE)
  • md
• performance improvements, for example:
  • static command lookup
  • bundle CLI runtime

These are the bigger areas that we'll define as projects in the repo. Of course, we're still going to keep adding new commands and extend commands that we already have with additional functionality.