I recently went to the European conference in Belguim with work colleagues and it was incredibly eye opening to new technologies becoming available, as well as the varying levels of maturity with the platform. This post will discuss some key points, but alongside Microsoft’s release plan, this will roll into ongoing updates as our teams evaluate them during our development to make it more digestable.

Key Community Members

As well as meeting new people via talks and finally saying hello to those already connected with online, here are some recommendations of very interesting and useful people to follow their work,

Matt Beard, Ben den Blanken and Mark Carrington gave superb talks on extending the platform, especially PowerFx. That’s going to be a complete game changer. Matt is also part of the team that organise Scottish Summit and Mark has some well regarded plugins for XRM Toolbox.

Mike Bassani and Sean Fiene head up the Dataverse team at Microsoft and have some amazing things coming for pro devs, governance and security (cough source control public preview next month cough).

April Dunnam has a YouTube channel about new features, but importantly soft skills and inclusion in the workplace.

An honourable mention to Scott Durow who also not from the conference, has some fantastic technical development videos online with the product teams at Microsoft. I’d also give Will Dorrington a follow who will open your eyes to how to be a lot more strategic with Power Platform, even if you’re a experienced pro-developer and your organisation is progressing down the maturity path.

Platform Extending

There are many options to extend the platform beyond the core tools of model driven apps, Power Automate, business rules, etc. I would follow Mark, Ben and Matt’s work to get more and better detail on this, but I’d like to summarise some key points I discovered about web resources, PCF and PowerFx.

Web resources are commonly JavaScript, which althought powerful are not within the native editors (you edit outside then upload), so it is very hard to debug, unit test, etc. It is also less responsive as it sits higher up the execution stack. There’s always a debate between business rules and JS in terms of out of the box tools or code, but being honest, I don’t think either suit the bill particularly well. Although both are solution aware, so you can tie them into your release pipelines.

PCFs can be written in C# or React, which gives many advantages – they are a lot more responsive as they sit at the same layer as the Microsoft code behind the scenes; react allows use of Fluent UI; also solution aware and browsable via the plugins panel on the left.

I wont mention webhooks and processes here as they are quite old at this point and Power Automate can pretty much do what both used to do.

PowerFx

Although primarily focussed around plugins, PowerFx has the ability to be a total game changer. The primary reason is it currently supporting 4 of the 5 execution pipeline stages: Pre Operation, Main Operation, Post Operation Sync and Post Operation Async. Only the first Pre Validation is currently not supported, but planned. This differs to flows, as they only operate at the very end after the transaction is completed, at an unknown time.

This has the potential to simplify plugins away from C# due to a simpler language and building them directly within the platform. They also have the potential to replace workflows/processes, webhooks, business rules and JavaScript, depending how far Microsoft take it, due to the real-time nature of execution. They also have robust monitoring, unit testing and can use connection references just like flows and apply to flows, model driven apps and canvas apps due to being tied to a table.

They are not fully there though. This is very much in preview, do not support steps like in C# plugins and do not support custom connectors.

If you wish to try it, go to make.preview.powerapps.com, click more on the left, then more again and it will be down the very bottom.

Governance

During an AMA, Mike Bassani mentioned “Power Catalogue” a tool to organise and group customisations, which sounded very useful. Not a great deal of detail was mentioned, but keep an eye out for this.

Source control is coming into public preview this month. This could be a total game changer to allow proper isolated developer environments (like branching) and therefore increase in cadence and reduction in risk during your CI/CD pipelines.

Microsoft Purview now has a Dataverse connector, which is great news for departments needing to act on Subject Access and Freedom of Information requests on this data without custom tools. We are currently testing this in work and I will write an article of my findings soon.

Security Hub is in preview and has many useful features which I wont go into here – but again Microsoft have some articles and presentations on this, please go to the source for more detail. Think Centre of Excellence and Admin Centre, but a lot bigger and a lot better.

Summary/Next…

It is difficult to not make this too long whilst also not copying other peoples presentations. I will write further articles soon, which will go into the detail of various features discussed here, strategic approaches to the platform, plus more.

I will also be starting some YouTube videos to discuss some items that are easier in audio/video format rather than text. But for anything you would like to learn or discuss, please comment, email or contact me on linkedin.