Visual BI has looked roughly the same since 2015. Bar charts, slicers, a page of KPI cards, maybe a tooltip page if you were feeling generous. Fabric Apps changed the options. With the Rayfin SDK you can deploy a real TypeScript web application into your Fabric workspace, running on Entra SSO, reading from the exact same Power BI semantic model your reports already use. Coding agents write most of that application for you.

So I built a Game Boy Color style game on top of a real Power BI semantic model. You walk around a tile world with the arrow keys and talk to NPCs. Sergeant Hall guards the gate and tells you when the books open and close. Pip sits by the fountain and knows which borough takes the most rides. Every conversation fires a validated DAX query at the semantic model and returns the answer in a typewriter dialogue box, which means the game updates when the nightly ETL run finishes. Total build time was about an hour of prompting, plus two rounds of fixing the things that broke.

In this session I build one live. We start from a written spec, generate look and feel with sprites and tiles as text arrays, wire the NPC dialogue menus to DAX queries against a real model, and deploy the whole thing to a workspace. Along the way I show the parts that went wrong the first time: text that renders unreadably at a 320x240 buffer, frame rate stutter from an over-ambitious render loop, and DAX that returns the right number to the wrong character. I also show the side-scrolling platformer (Mario, anybody?) version, because one genre was never going to be enough.

Then the honest part. Nobody is going to close their month end by walking a pixel avatar over to the finance NPC. What this unlocks is a category of data interface that Power BI reports cannot cover: onboarding experiences, interactive explainers for a board that will never open a report, client gifts that get talked about for a year, and internal tools where the write-back and the analytics live in the same governed workspace.

Aimed at Power BI and Fabric developers who are comfortable with semantic models and DAX and want to see how far Fabric Apps goes. You do not need to write TypeScript. You do need to be willing to let an agent write code you have not read line by line, and to be honest about when that is acceptable.

Level: 300. It assumes semantic models, DAX, and workspace permissions as background, and it covers a preview workload most attendees have not touched.

Target audience: Power BI developers, Fabric developers, BI consultants, and analytics leads who own semantic models and are wondering what Fabric Apps is actually for. Being a 90s kid helps but is not mandatory ;-)

Prerequisites: Working knowledge of Power BI semantic models and basic DAX. Familiarity with VS Code helps. No TypeScript, no game development experience.

Learning objectives:
- Explain what Fabric Apps and the Rayfin SDK are, how an app authenticates with Entra SSO, and how it queries a semantic model.
- Write a build spec that a coding agent can execute end to end, including the gotchas that show up between local host and a deployed workspace.
- Judge when a custom Fabric App is a better answer than a Power BI report, and when it is an expensive gimmick.