It's been a quiet year so far in terms of what's been coming out, but I wanted to provide an update on progress, as well as what's happening next.

Version 1.8 is a maintenance update, which brings Deneb up to the latest Microsoft APIs and certification standards and updates the current Vega and Vega-Lite runtimes. It also prepares the v1 codebase for the end of feature development and long-term service continuity, while addressing several minor but long-standing bugs.

We're excited to introduce a brand-new sample workbook designed to help you get started with Deneb and Vega-Lite for Power BI. Inside, you'll find practical learning materials, a selection official Vega datasets, and various chart types to help you dive straight into the world of Deneb and the powerful grammar of graphics behind Vega and Vega-Lite.

I've become smitten with this stacked bar chart alternative, as recently showcased on the Flerlage Twins blog. This article is a brilliant insight into a collaborative process between Sebastine Amede, Darragh Murray and Kevin, with a further spotlight on folks who have inspired their final design. It's a really brilliant way of keeping the part-to-whole idea of a stacked bar chart, while also making the individual segments much easier to compare.

As always, when I see cool things (and because I enjoy using the tooling as well as developing it), I wonder how easy they might be to replicate in Power BI using Deneb. I thought it would be a fun exercise to try and replicate the example from the blog post using Vega-Lite. Fortunately, Vega-Lite has multiple encoding channels along each direction for Cartesian plots, which makes it a fairly straightforward process.

It's a wonderful time of the year when I look over community contributions for my membership in the Microsoft MVP program. As some of this includes looking at how Deneb is doing, I thought it'd also be a good time to provide an update on Deneb's usage and a few bits about what's been happening lately.

1.7.2 is the next minor update that fixes initial issues observed in the 1.7 release. As usual, the standalone build is available now, and the AppSource version is currently undergoing certification.

1.7.1 is a minor update that fixes initial issues observed in the 1.7 release. The standalone build is available now, and the AppSource version is currently undergoing certification.

It's a big day - Deneb 1.7 has passed certification! 🎉🎉

Deneb 1.7 is a significant update, and we're excited to submit it to AppSource very soon! Before we do that, we're opening beta testing for the community so that we can ensure that the quality of the submitted version is as good as possible for all users.