Why is the Development Experience in Power BI so Buggy compared to other BI providers?

[Anonymous]

Developing in Power BI Desktop is a bit crawling over broken glass in that the DAX Editor is terrible and doesn't allow you to format your code in the correct way (Carriage retuns, indentation). Every change I seem to make there is a noticable lag/difference between what I'm asking the IDE to do and what the IDE wants to do at that point in time. I have not experienced any of the same issues when using Qlik, Tableau etc so I'm wondering why the dev experience is so bad with this product.

Also just to note, my workflow has been impacted badly recently by random bugs that MS don't feel the need to tell anyone about and then act quite casual about getting it fixed once a large number of people start complaining about it (The Z Index bug being the most notable recent instance). It makes me wonder what's happening with their deployment pipeline for such important things to be missed in their regression and acceptance testing and rolled out to unsuspecting people like myself who then have to spend hours investigating their bugs for them.

[Greg_Deckler]

@Anonymous So, use Shift+Enter for carriage returns and Tab for indentation. Only complaint I have with Tab'ing sometimes is the type-ahead pops up so have to hit Esc to make that go away before hitting Tab. Beyond that, I haven't experienced any lag issues with composing measures and calculated columns. I have a Surface with Windows 10 and 16 GB of memory. Does your computer have similar specs?

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the info Greg. It could be a lot more user intuitive. Sometimes the editor won't expand so you can't even see the full code and when you click off the editor you have to click right at the bottom of the IDE (I can only assume because of some invisible rectangle element that's messing with the mouse context). I'm running windows 10 with 8GB of RAM. Whenever I create a measure, I get 10 to 15 seconds of spinny wheel (Same when doing things like changing number formats). If I add up all those spinny wheel seconds over the course of a day, it's a significant productivity hog. Also, it crashes quite often and the recovered files often are missing changes that I've made when I open but some changes are still there meaning that I have to spend time working out what has and hasn't changed and go back and redo the changes it's inexplicably deleted.

The issue I'm having right now is that I've added nex objects to my model but they chanmge is not reflected in the model view. Same when I add relationships in the model view. It just doesn't update visually even though the model itself is actually updated. I just get weird error messages saying the relationship already exists when visually in the model it does not. I can only assume this is another bug from a recent release.

All of the issues mentioned I have had roblems with today and some are a regular occurence. As I say, never had these sort of issues in comparable products.

[Anonymous]

Only way I can get the model view to update is by closing the PBIX and reopening it. Not ideal for every time you need to make a change