Make PBI desktop the one-stop IDE for all of Power BI

Developing locally is far better than browser based editing for all the usual reasons - limited functionality, session timeouts and connectivity issues, lack of source control or any visibility of your artifact. Unfortuantely, there are still too many artifacts that must be edited in browser, e.g. dataflows and datamarts. In the modern data world, these things aren't isolated units but part of much bigger interconnected solutions, but the current state of development tools does not reflect this. In particular it's a big problem to e.g. develop dataflows with the appropriate change governance for something that is intended to be a fairly upstream entity - the export json function doesn't do much good when you can't import a json file to change an existing dataflow.

PBI desktop has the potential for being a one-stop IDE for all Power BI development, but currently it only has the ability to output pbix/pbit files that necessarily contain both a dataset and report. If reworked as an IDE it could:

• Allow for development of dataflows and datamarts locally
• Allow developers to maintain an entire solution containing many related artifacts
• Integrate with source control, with potential for regression testing and CI/CD pipelines (e.g. ALM toolkit scripts in the same solution)
• Reuse of M/DAX libraries across an enterprise or application suite
• Integration with visual development projects
• Treating datasets and reports as separate objects, as Microsoft advise we develop anyway!

Alternatively, a Power BI extension in visual studio/visual studio code would be great, and allow us to create solutions that link in with other parts of a data stack (e.g. a SQL data warehouse) much easier.