Instructions and skills
Repository instructions, path-scoped instructions, and on-demand skills that carry your team’s naming, TMDL, and report conventions. Labs 03 and 06.
Contoso Pharmacy Copilot Lab
Teach GitHub Copilot your team's modeling conventions, then watch it turn a weak Power BI semantic model into one that answers business questions correctly. Everything runs on your own machine against synthetic data.
What you’ll build
Section titled “What you’ll build”You start with a Power BI Project (PBIP) whose semantic model has cryptic names, no descriptions, a missing relationship, and no measures. In the committed sample runs, a Copilot agent asked five business questions about it scores 3 out of 10. After the improvements, the same questions score 10 out of 10. Your live runs will vary a little. Along the way, you build and use every kind of Copilot customization.
Custom agents and handoffs
Five agents with scoped tools: an assessor, an improver, a question tester, a reviewer, and a lab author. Handoff buttons chain them. Labs 05 to 10.
MCP
Power BI Modeling MCP connects agents to the model open in Power BI Desktop, so they can list tables and run DAX. Lab 04.
Hooks and the CLI
Deterministic guardrails that block edits to generated data and run a lint after every change, in Copilot CLI and VS Code. Lab 11.
Pull requests and the cloud agent
CI that needs no Fabric tenant, Copilot code review, and an issue handed to the Copilot cloud agent. Labs 12 and 13.
Build and share your own
Write your own skill, agent, and prompt, then share them with APM. Lab 14.
How long it takes
Section titled “How long it takes”| Track | Labs | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Full hands-on (Windows 11 with Power BI Desktop) | 00 to 15 | 7 to 9 hours, best split over three sessions |
| Core | 01, 02, 04 to 07, 10 to 12 | About 4.5 hours |
| Copilot customization only (macOS, or no Desktop) | 00, 01, 03, 06, 07, 11 to 15 | About 5 hours |
| Presenter | 00 to 02, then a demo script | 1.5 hours of prep |
Choose a track to have the “Next” links follow it.
What you need
Section titled “What you need”- A GitHub account with a Copilot plan that includes agent mode and MCP. Labs 12 and 13 need Copilot code review and the Copilot cloud agent, which need a paid plan.
- Windows 11 for the full track, because Power BI Desktop runs only on Windows. macOS works for the customization-only track.
- About 10 GB of free disk space and permission to install PowerShell 7, Git, Python, Node.js, VS Code, and Power BI Desktop.
- No Microsoft Fabric tenant, capacity, workspace, or service principal. Nothing in this lab touches the cloud except GitHub.
See Prerequisites for the full list.
Your progress stays with you
Section titled “Your progress stays with you”Tick boxes, your track, and quiz answers are saved in your browser’s local storage and never sent anywhere. The site has no analytics and loads nothing from other sites. See My progress to export or reset it.