Using Power BI Desktop for developing custom visuals?

[matthiasnielsen]

Is it possible to use Power BI Desktop for developing (deploying + testing) custom visuals in maner similar to Power BI Online?
I have installed the powerbi-visuals-tools from npm, setup my development environment in Webstorm, and deployed/packaged and tested the update count and static bar chart examples in both Power BI Online (via Developer Tools) and Power BI Desktop (by importing custom visual).

However, for reasons beyond my control, I am developing custom visualizations for a Azure SQL Server data source, which I can only connect to via Power BI Desktop. And updating a custom visualization with a new build in Power BI Desktop is quite cumbersome because it involves deleting and readding the custom visualization from the *.pbiviz file.

Any suggestions for developing custom visualizations using Power BI Desktop, or for easing the workflow for updating with new builds, will be most welcome! 🙂

Having experience with Tableau and D3 (separately), Power BI seems to have great potential. But being restricted to use Power BI Online (due to the data source I need to use, I know) is a bit of a drawback.

[v-chuncz-msft]

@matthiasnielsen,

Based on my experience, there is no simpler and easier way. To help improve Power BI, you may submit an idea or leave a comment at GitHub.

[matthiasnielsen]

@v-chuncz-msft

Thanks for your reply.

I was hoping I had a missed check mark for delevoper mode (or something) somewhere in the desktop application 🙂

For the interested, I have submitted my question as a suggestion. Vote for it if you also miss the feature:

https://ideas.powerbi.com/forums/265200-power-bi-ideas/suggestions/17167010-make-deploying-and-testi...