Alternative place to develop PowerQUERY/M code

[robm135]

I'm trying to write some complicated (to me at least) M code to fetch data from APIs and I'm wondering if there is a better place to write and develop this instead of powerbi desktop. 

I'm a Visual Studio Code user, there is a code intellisense plugin, but no support to actually run code. 

I've seen blogs where people install power query SDK into Visual Studio, but I was hoping to avoid installing the whole Visual Studio. 

Anyone else know of any options?

[v-jingzhang · Accepted solution]

Hi @robm135 

To run M code, it requires Mashup Engine. Mashup Engine is not a stand-alone application. It is embeded in some desktop tools like Excel, Power BI Desktop, Visual Studio... Reza Rad has a blog about it: What Is Power Query? Introduction to Data Mash-up Engine of Power BI - RADACAD

If you don't want to install Visual Studio, you can try Power Query Online in Power BI Dataflow/Power Platform Dataflow. The experience is similar to that in Power BI Desktop and there is no code intellisense there. 

Here is one tool for your reference, but it still requires Visual Studio. 

GitHub - gsimardnet/PowerQueryNet: Run M Language (Power Query Formula Language) from anywhere.

Best Regards,
Community Support Team _ Jing
If this post helps, please Accept it as Solution to help other members find it.

[Vijay_A_Verma]

If you don't want to install complete Visual Studio, another alternative is following which provides M language capability in Visual Studio Code which is quite lightweight. Also VS Code is free of cost for both private or commercial use (Ref - https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/faq )

Power Query language service for VS Code

[robm135]

Yep I got that, it's just does intellisense and snippets. You can't run anything. 

[Vijay_A_Verma]

Yes, you can just write syntactically correct code. You can't run the code here. 

[robm135]

yep the question is about where to run code besides visual studio