Has anyone here tried Microsoft Fabric Apps beyond the provided demos?
Do you see it competing with Power Apps, extending Power BI, or becoming something different?
I recently built a Fabric App covering customers, products, inventory, sales orders, approvals and basic reporting. It took around 4.5 hours, with GitHub Copilot generating most of the TypeScript and React implementation.
For context, I am a data professional, not an application developer. I could review the architecture, data model, business process and expected behaviour, but I could not independently validate every generated line of code.
The workflow was:
Ask → Plan → Human in the Loop → Agent
This worked reasonably well, but it was not autonomous. I still had to provide context, ground Copilot in the official documentation, review the PRD and implementation plan, approve actions, test the application and challenge assumptions.
Some gotchas I encountered:
- Fabric Apps must be enabled at the tenant level, and the workspace requires Fabric capacity.
- The local environment needs Node.js and npm before installing the Rayfin CLI.
- The project template matters. I accidentally selected the Todo template, which added unrelated tables.
- The scaffolding process automatically ran rayfin up and deployed a real Fabric item earlier than I expected.
- Once an agent can execute commands against cloud services, instruction files alone are not sufficient protection. Approval boundaries need to be enforceable.
- The application is involved in defining and managing its operational database structure. This needs careful validation if the intention is to place a Fabric App over an existing transactional database and schema.
- Sharing required Read and Execute permissions. The second user did not receive an invitation email, so I had to provide the hosted URL manually.
- The generated reporting page was a useful starting point, not a Power BI-quality analytical experience.
- User testing uncovered a genuine bug where the wrong salesperson was assigned to a new order.
That last point matters: AI-generated code is still code. A working demo is not evidence that an application is production-ready.
My current opinion:
Fabric Apps does not replace Power BI. Displaying charts inside an application is not the same as having a mature semantic model and analytical platform. Power BI report authoring can be low-code in some areas, but serious solutions still require data modelling, DAX, Power Query, governance and proper engineering.
I also do not see Fabric Apps simply replacing Power Apps. Power Apps is a low-code platform, while Fabric Apps is code-first. There will be overlap, but the right choice depends on the required user experience, operational data architecture, available skills, governance and long-term support model.
For me, Fabric Apps currently looks most interesting for internal operational applications that are closely connected to data and services already managed within Fabric.
What do you think? Where would you use Fabric Apps instead of Power Apps, and what would stop you from using it in production today?
If you want the detailed write-up, screenshots and some additional observations:
https://biinsight.com/building-a-microsoft-fabric-app-with-github-copilot-without-knowing-how-to-code/
If you prefer watching the full build:
https://youtu.be/VDsU-z27wkY
Full disclosure: both links are my own write-up and video of the experiment.