Bad first experience on Windows: esbuild policy block, slow CLI startup

Summary

First-time experience report on Windows and WSL.

Environment

• Windows (primary) + WSL

Issues encountered

1. Blocking policy on Windows — esbuild.exe not allowed to run

On Windows, scaffolding was blocked because esbuild.exe was not permitted to run due to a local security policy. There was no clear error message guiding toward a workaround.

Switching to WSL resolved this immediately — scaffolding succeeded without issues.

2. Slow rayfin --help startup

Running rayfin --help takes an unexpectedly long time to render output. This is noticeable even for a simple help command and hurts the first impression.

By contrast, rayfin docs --help renders quickly, so the slowness appears to be specific to the top-level --help path.

3. Slow npm install

npm i takes a long time to complete. This may be a WSL-specific issue (filesystem overhead), but worth noting as part of the onboarding experience.

4. Rayfin cannot find my Fabric workspace

After scaffolding, Rayfin was unable to discover my Fabric workspace. I had created a Fabric trial workspace, but the CLI did not list or detect it. This blocks completing the end-to-end setup.

What I tried

Ran the Basic Todo App starter — End-to-end Fabric-authenticated todo CRUD with a Rayfin data model and per-user row-level security.

I had no prior Fabric experience but was able to figure out how to create a Fabric trial workspace and get the app running. The scaffold itself worked well once the esbuild policy issue was worked around via WSL.

Suggestions

• Add documentation or a warning for Windows users about potential esbuild.exe execution policy issues, with a recommended workaround (e.g. use WSL, or allowlist the binary).
• Investigate the rayfin --help startup time — lazy loading or deferred imports might help.
• Consider documenting known slow npm install behavior on WSL and any mitigations.
• Improve workspace discovery: add clearer error messaging when a Fabric workspace cannot be found, and document prerequisites for trial workspaces.