Happy new year everyone!
Since 2022 has started, we have released new deployment pipelines features, that enable plenty of new ways to work with deployment pipelines and leverage its advantages for a more productive release process.
Power BI automation tools extension for Azure DevOps 
During October, we announced that deployment pipelines REST APIs are generally available. Now we are releasing the first official Power BI extension for the Visual Studio marketplace- Power BI automation tools.
Using the extension, it will be easier than ever to automate your deployment operations using Azure pipelines.
The extension contains all the API operations available today for deployment pipelines. Using the extension, you can set tasks for:
- Creating and editing pipelines
- Assigning workspaces
- Adding users to a pipeline and a workspace
- Managing deployments across the pipeline stages
All these operations can be used with Azure pipelines, while integrating additional capabilities into the release process such as automated testing, approvals and more.
Learn more about the Power BI automation tools extension.
Multiple pipelines working together
One of the biggest advantages of deployment pipelines, is auto-binding. With auto-binding, you don’t need to worry about how items will connect across different stages or configure all these connections every time. Deployment pipelines just does it for you, and that reduces manual work and errors.
Today we are very happy to unlock this capability across multiple pipelines. For example, if you have datasets managed in one pipeline, and connected reports are managed in other pipelines by different groups, the auto binding will work in the same way it works in a single pipeline. We will auto-bind connections between the same stages, even in separate pipelines.
How can you enable it?
Well… you don’t have to do anything! It will just work starting as of now. All you need to do is make sure that items are connected across the same stages. For example, if a dataset in the development stage is connected to a report in the development stage of another pipeline, when both will be deployed to the test stage, they will be automatically connected to each other.
Learn more about multiple pipelines working together.
Dataflows and Linked entities support in deployment pipelines 
Starting this week, dataflows support in deployment pipelines is generally available. As part of this release, we have added support for linked entities in a pipeline. You can now manage multiple dataflows connected to each other in the same workspace and deploy them safely across the pipeline stages. As mentioned in the previous section, after the deployment linked entities will be connected to each other in the same structure they had in the source stage. No manual configuration is required by the user to maintain exiting connections.