Troubleshooting Power Platform Extension for VSCode – PAC Connection Timeout & Co…

In the last post I’ve talked about the Power Platform Extension for VS Code, and that it’s not only a rebranding from “Power Apps CLI”. Since we used the “pac cli” for a while, the community found ways to work around some pac cli problems. But the VSCode extension is a NuGet Package which works inside VSCode, so the changes made for the “pac” MSI package won’t apply. Where to find the “pac cli” for VSCode?

Increase Timeout for pac pcf push/pac solution publish

Scott Durow wrote a blog where he shared with us a way to increase the timeout for “pac pcf push”. I was very happy to know about this setting, since lately every try to publish the customizations is taking longer than the 2 minutes limit. The publish could affect a “pac solution publish” or the “pac pcf push” (or maybe there is more). As a PCF developer, when “pac pcf push” keeps ending in timeout, I never know when the publish in done.

As Scott posted, we can increase the timeout for the “pac cli” , by locating the “pac.exe.config” and adding the following underneath the startup node.

<appSettings>
  <add key="MaxDataverseConnectionTimeOutMinutes" value="10"/>
</appSettings>

The config should be located here

%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\PowerAppsCLI

After finding it, search for the folder named like the version you want to use (like “Microsoft.PowerApps.CLI.1.7.2“) use, and then look inside “tools“.

The similar config for the VSCode extension is located here:

%appdata%\Code\User\globalStorage\microsoft-isvexptools.powerplatform-vscode\

That’s because the extension is installed globaly:

The rest is similar: locate the “\pac\tools\pac.exe.config” and add the magic appSettings as Scott taught us:

and the timeout problems should be gone :-). In case it doesn’t work, you could try to restart your VSCode.

After installing a newer version, you need to make the changes again.

Let’s recap:

pac cli

Root: 
      %localappdata%\Microsoft\PowerAppsCLI\Microsoft.PowerApps.CLI.X.X.X
File: 
      \tools\pac.exe.config

Example: C:\Users\YourProfileName\AppData\Local\Microsoft\PowerAppsCLI\Microsoft.PowerApps.CLI.1.7.2\tools\pac.exec.config

VSCode

Root: 
      %appdata%\code\User\globalStorage\microsoft-isvexptools.powerplatform-vscode
File: 
      \pac\tools\pac.exe.config

Example: C:\Users\YourProfileName\AppData\Roaming\Code\User\globalStorage\microsoft-isvexptools.powerplatform-vscode\pac\tools\pac.exe.config

Localization issue

If your Windows is not in english, you might have the same problem as me: I wish the pac cli was not translated. I like my dev tooling installed in english. I need also to make some demos, where the german command description won’t help much.

Thanks to Guido Preite, I’ve lerned how to force the pac cli to use the english localizations. Inside the “pac” location (same as above): %localappdata%\Microsoft\PowerAppsCLI\Microsoft.PowerApps.CLI.X.X.X go to “\tools\loc\de” (or the language you don’t want to be displayed), and rename the “de” to “de_old”. After that you should get the english labels. Or just replace the strings.localozation.json with the one from the “en”.

For the VSCode extension, at first I didn’t knew where to start. I hoped I can switch the “pac” to the VSCode language (since VSCode allows it). I’ve opened an issue on the powerplatform-vscode github. There I was told to change my “Windows display language” to english. After also changing the “Regional format” and the “Keyboad” back to german, I was ok with this solution. You can go with it too, but if you prefer to make the change only for “pac”, since now we know where the “pac” gets installed, we can locate the localization file for VSCode too:

%appdata%\code\User\globalStorage\microsoft-isvexptools.powerplatform-vscode\ and then “pac\tools\loc\de”

Let’s recap:

pac cli

Root: 
      %localappdata%\Microsoft\PowerAppsCLI\Microsoft.PowerApps.CLI.X.X.X
File: 
      \tools\loc\yourLanguage

VSCode

Root: 
      %appdata%\code\User\globalStorage\microsoft-isvexptools.powerplatform-vscode
File: 
      \pac\tools\loc\yourLanguage

PAC Logs

Sometimes we get some errors from the pac cli, where we would like to see more details. It might be worth to have a look to the logs. We know now where to find them (similar to the “loc”).

For the PAC CLI MSI

%localappdata%\Microsoft\PowerAppsCLI\Microsoft.PowerApps.CLI.X.X.X\tools\logs

For the VSCode we find the logs here

%appdata%\code\User\globalStorage\microsoft-isvexptools.powerplatform-vscode\pac\tools\logs