Forum Discussion
Newbie trying custom visual
Hello All,
I am new to the power bi community and this is myfirst day interacting regrding custom power bi visuals development.
Can anyone please tell me what all languages should i start learning to develop custom visuals. Any links , books , pdf's shared is greatly appreciated. Other than SQL and C# i havent worked on any other languages .
Thanks
4 Replies
Hi there, and welcome aboard!
Custom visuals can be developed using R or TypeScript. The majority of turorials use the latter, and as TypeScript builds on JavaScript, it's essentially client-side web development - there are a lot of regular resources on that side of things.
Sadly there are no books on custom visual development, but here's a few links to help you get started:
- MS documentation - there are some tutorials for both R and TypeScript in here
- Jorge's Channel has a pretty good guided learning approach. Most of this should still be good for v2.3 of the API
- I did a presentation recently where we built a simple visual, which might be useful for you. This has a PDF of the presentation and the source code (you can checkout tags to view the code at the appropriate point of the presentation).
- d3.js galleries - if you want to learn what D3 is and what you might be able to achieve
NOTE: Regarding a lot of tutorials (mine included), they refer to the older version of the toolkit (2.x), as there have been breaking changes to these in 3.x, which has just been released. If you're going to follow these, then they will often suggest you run the following to install the tools:
npm i power-bi-visuals-tools -g
Run this instead, to make sure that the code you create from these will be compatible:
npm i [email protected] -g
I hope some of this is useful, and good luck!
Daniel
One of the biggest barriers to entry for data folks is the fact that custom visuals require a transition into web development. If you've used C#, TypeScript adds some features to JS you'll be familiar with but a solid understanding of JS will help a lot with stuff that isn't specific to the custom visuals SDK.
From a quick seach and overview, any of the following should get you into the basics:
- https://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp
- https://www.codecademy.com/learn/introduction-to-javascript
- https://www.learn-js.org/
- https://javascript.info/
As the custom visuals SDK utilises, Node.js, you might want to have a look at how that works in the solution too.
