Understanding authentication profiles

Let's first understand what authentication profiles are. Authentication profiles are connections that have been verified by a Microsoft authentication service to a particular Dataverse environment and are saved on your local machine in the form of JSON files. These connections are machine-specific, so if you change your machine, you will have to re-create the profiles.

Now let's understand why these authentication profiles are needed. In previous chapters, we discussed that some of the capabilities provided by the Power Apps component framework cannot be tested using the test harness, and we need to deploy code components to a live Dataverse environment in a very streamlined, quick, and reliable way. Authentication profiles provide that ability. This makes it easier for us to perform our end-to-end testing of code components.

So, let's look at how to create these profiles.