Power Platform Boost Podcast

No bad weather, Just bad clothes (#29)

• Season 1 • Episode 29

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0:00 | 36:47

Nick and his family have been visiting Norway and Ulrikke and her family took them troll hunting. We talk about Power Platform environments that you can now group, personal pipelines, and news for ALM. We also highlight community content from Diana Birkelback, Matt Collins Jones, and Andrew Buteenko. 
 
News

 

Color Cloud

ColorCloud, April 18-19th, Hamburg
5€ discount: AKERBAEK5 or DOELMAN5
ColorCloud on LinkedIn:
ColorChallenge 🌈

 

Nick is speaking at

 

EPPC 24

European Power Platform Conference
Brussels, June 11-13th
Use BOOST for a 10% discount

 

Nordic Summit 2024: Call for Speakers closes April 30th



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[0:00]

Weather and Norwegian Wisdom

[0:00]

Yeah. And I learned a Norwegian thing. There's no such thing as bad weather.

There's bad clothing. Yes. Is that very Norwegian? I knew that.

I knew that was very Norwegian. And it's true, don't you think?

[0:10]

Music.

[0:29]

Power Platform Boost Podcast Introduction

[0:30]

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Power Platform Boost podcast,

your timely source of Power Platform news and updates with your hosts,

Nick Dolman and Ulrike Ackerbeck.

Hey. Hey. Can we do that again? Yes, we are. In the same place.

Our third, second alternate recording studio.

In my house in Norway again. Yes.

And this time I'm here for a little bit different. I actually came here for,

well, I was working, but a vacation as well. Yeah.

And our families got to hang out, which is really cool.

That was so good. Finally, we got to go troll hunting. Yeah. Yeah.

[1:13]

I went hiking in the woods. It was a rainy day, but it was all good.

And the sun came out and the skies cleared and it was all good.

Very good. Yeah. And I learned a Norwegian thing.

There's no such thing as bad weather. There's bad clothing. Yes,

is that very Norwegian? I knew that. I knew that was very Norwegian.

[1:32]

Family Fun and ColorCloud Plans

[1:31]

And it's true, don't you think?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. No, it was a great time. And then, yeah,

I loaded the family up on a plane, sent them back home and stayed here for a few things.

And then we're going to ColourCloud later this week. Right.

So first we're going to Oslo the next couple of days, or you are.

And then we're going to go to Hamburg on Wednesday.

Stay there until Sunday for ColorCloud.

It's going to be so much fun. and just just

so you guys know because we've been posting and

talking and ranting about this the color cloud color

challenge as a fundraiser thing

we do to raise money for charity and you know connected to the color cloud event

and we've had so last booze quest was about what color we would call dye our

hair because that's the color challenge and nick still don't know what that that poll result is.

You said you wouldn't check. No, I haven't checked. And you haven't found the form, right? So...

At this point, I know what color is winning.

[2:35]

So if you want, I close the vote so you can't vote anymore.

And on Wednesday, we're going to go to Hamburg when a color is here.

And we're going to have blindfolds on Nick.

So that he won't know what color he gets before it's done.

[2:53]

How amazing is that? Yeah. We don't have much to work with.

This is probably the longest my hair has been in a while. because I thought

I'd give you at least something.

You're growing it out just for this. I love that. So good. So good.

You're darned. Yeah, because then maybe you will show.

[3:09]

The color will actually show. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. So excited about this.

So happy that we get to raise this money for charity.

And I don't really, let me just check the status so far.

We raised over 6,000 euros this far.

The goal is 10,000. And by the time this goes on air, it will be finished.

But I know also that Mats and the other hosts of the Color Cloud conference

have other ideas of how to raise more money for charity. And it's going to go into the same pool.

[3:45]

Fundraising and Hair Dye Challenges

[3:41]

So keep donating and keep supporting us.

And, you know, the end game. And by the time this goes live,

people, I hope we reached our goal, which is to get Mark Christie to dye his

hair and beard. And I talked to him earlier this week and I said,

well, color your hair red.

And he said, what? Red? No, no, no. I was looking blue.

[4:03]

Just imagine Mark Christie with blue beard in here.

Oh, what we do for charity, I must say.

And speaking of the charities, it's each person that's participated in that

got to pick basically their own charity.

And I think it had to be based on the Better Place, Oregon.

[4:22]

Charity Choices and Personal Connections

[4:20]

It had to be sort of, I think, German based or whatever for the account.

Or there were some rules around that, but you just want to quickly let people

know what the charity you picked is.

Oh, yeah, it was a Sox and I have to go check now.

It was a place where people can go when they come to a new place.

They they're driven out of their house, their home and they migrate and they they end up in Germany.

Then they can go to this house and they can meet each other.

And it's a social space to kind of reconnect with the community.

And I feel that's very important. And this this time. Yeah, yeah.

And I ended up picking for a diabetes organization.

My wife is diabetic. She's been diabetic since her 20s. So she takes insulin,

measures her blood sugar every day.

And it's amazing the technology that's been involved to help manage that.

But still, I know there's a lot of people suffering from diabetes around the world.

And it's not fun to have to take insulin every day and to monitor all your blood

sugar and everything like that. So this is something, that was the charity that I picked.

[5:25]

And I'm just happy that we were able to hit our personal targets in terms of

we're getting our hair colored.

But still, overall, there's other targets to hit.

So hopefully we'll get there and you'll see, if you're going to ColorCloud,

you're going to see a lot of colorful heads.

Absolutely. A lot of, yeah, we'll see. I'm a little, I got to say,

I have a bit of anxiousness about all this now.

Oh, I love it. But, oh, just put you out of your comfort zone. Oh, totally.

So the current goal is to raise $6,500 for Ana Ines, and she will actually get a tattoo.

And then next up is Chris Humphrey, also with a tattoo. And then we have Scott Giroux.

He's going to dye his hair green, people, if you raise enough money.

I mean, come on, two tattoos and then two hair colors because you have more Christy at the end.

It's worth it. Come on. So I hope you guys donate. And, you know,

as I said, by the time this airs, it will be maybe it will be too late.

But so I hope that people get the message. Cool.

All right. So did anything happen in the Power Platform world this week?

No, the color here and the tattoos, that's it. So yeah, I don't have anything else.

[6:36]

And we've been out hiking all week, so we haven't really checked. No, we have.

Yes. We have a OneNote running where we put all the new news and updates from

the community throughout the week. It's always in the back of our heads.

We paste links into this OneNote all the time.

And at the top, you have an item, which is close to my heart.

So it says environment groups yeah

so what is it oh so basically it's a

new way a new kind of a mechanism to group environments together

um as because as

it's interesting so if i look at my own personal

tenant it's just me and maybe

a few others that help like you help out a bit and things and other you

know and so there's only a certain amount of environments no

problem very manageable when i worked at microsoft we had

an environment like we had a tenant where we could could work on stuff and

there would be like literally hundreds like imagine at microsoft

like hundreds if not thousands of different

environments and you had to sort through and find the environment you're working

on and and then they also had a mechanism they would

clean up environment all the time so you had to make sure that you're on top

of that but this way now you have environment groups so you can actually create

groups within a large tenant and group those for certain things assign them

to certain users and manage those large scale um antennas into different groups and things like that.

And of course, it comes with a whole bunch of other things as well.

You know, creating an environment group, creating rules for the environment

group to make sure governance and everything like that.

[8:05]

So we'll have the link in the show notes as well about, you know,

the details about the strategies, the creating, the configuring the rules, the sharings.

[8:14]

Environment Groups and Governance

[8:14]

The routing and stuff like that to make sure your new users get to the right

group that they should belong to so a lot of good goodness there and again it's

just the whole governance story every week there's just it gets better and better

to keep because the power platform is so flexible but you need to make sure

you have the right guardrails and everything to make sure,

that your your environments are in good shape going forward yeah and so to you

know have good good environments to start building things like PCFs.

Ah, there you go. Nice little segue there.

[8:47]

Yeah, no, I absolutely love the environment groups. And I remember back when

I was a SharePoint developer as well, you had site collections.

And we went from, so by the, you know, in the space of me being a SharePoint

developer, we went from kind of a site collection being this huge thing where

you would, you know, you would plan it in advance. You wouldn't have too many in your organization.

It was kind of a big deal. And suddenly groups came along and suddenly a site

collection was nothing.

It was something you just spun up for what you needed that week kind of thing

or just for this project or just for this customer.

And suddenly it kind of felt like a smaller piece of the puzzle.

And then the number grew and grew and the IT department was freaking out because

they couldn't even see back then the site collections that was created behind

a group that we now know as a team.

And the same thing kind of goes for environment.

You used to have this idea of you have your big production environment where

everything goes and no, no, no.

And suddenly now every user can have three developer environments.

It kind of takes that down a notch. And so you have so many and being able to

kind of have a structure of it. I want to see metadata.

I want to see tags. I want to see so many more telemetry on this to be able

to group and slice and dice and sort just like we can with other data sources as well.

Also, I'm just thinking we are just seeing the beginning of this actually,

but yeah, definitely something to look out for. Um.

[10:12]

And, yeah, PCF. I'm going to ruin your segue. I'm sorry. That's okay.

[10:19]

Learning Roadmap for PCF Controls

[10:17]

That's fine. I'm used to it. I always have things to say.

So the segue into the PCFs is because the next item on my list is Dina Birkelbach's

blog post series or blog post about how to learn PCF controls or to build them more like it.

So she has a blog post called PCF Learning Roadmap, where she goes through everything

from start to finish, from prerequisites, what do you need to install on your computer,

setting up the environments you need to get up and running,

links to deeper learning material for TypeScript and NPM and React and everything

else that's kind of in the ecosystem around PCFs,

and also code snippets along the way so that you can actually implement and

you do what she does throughout her blog post.

[11:07]

For me, I'm diving into ProCode more and more. These kinds of resources is gold.

I absolutely love the way that Diana writes blog posts as well.

So structured and organized and meticulous. It's just absolutely perfect.

So if you're new and you want to get started with PCFs, it's a good way to start.

Or if you're older and want to get into PCFs, it's always been on my list.

I need to dive more into PCFs because there's so many things you can do with it.

It's just sort of that one area that I'm still, I'm still a total noob in PCF control.

So I saw this, yeah, Lake as well. Diana's stuff's amazing.

So she is the, she's like the PCF master, I think, in terms of her trainings and things like that.

And the thing is, every time I'm doing a workshop at a conference,

she's usually doing a workshop on PCFs. So I'm kind of like,

oh, I know what, I do a workshop, but I want to go to a workshop.

[12:02]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get it. But I'm exactly the same. So, yeah.

So check that out for sure. And then next thing on the list is also one of mine.

But I think maybe you need to alternate a bit down here.

Do you want to do the Copilot answer thing? Yeah, yeah, for sure.

So this is something PowerPages related.

[12:20]

Personal Pipelines Preview

[12:21]

Or no, that's not PowerPages related.

Copilot answer control was something that kind of came up. And this is where

it's the new Copilot answer control.

It is now in public preview. preview um so it's probably been out in a private

preview for a while but it's basically a control that you can slap into your your power apps to get um.

[12:42]

It's more like it's more that ai that ai

prompting so as opposed for you looking for something or

trying to drill down into a dashboard or whatever now this

co-pilot control can actually go through and give you that

information and the blog posts that microsoft put out they talk about the daily

schedule of an hvac technician um whereas you know for them if they have an

app they're going through where's my next stop but this time the co-pilot is

telling them oh here's where your next appointment starts here's what you're

going to need to know um and things like that and now Now,

this will right now, this control ties into Dataverse,

which if you're using something like field service, whatever,

well, yeah, all that information is in Dataverse and it can kind of summarize

that, but also go things in terms of, you know, answering questions and things like that.

So as opposed to trying to go through an advanced find and find all certain

things, now we can start asking it questions sort of like, you know,

how many accounts that have a certain amount of revenue, if you're using sales,

for example, or even your own data, how much it's that.

It's sort of the, the Star Trek computer telling me blah, blah, blah, blah.

And this will start going through your Dataverse data and within the app itself,

beginning to show you this.

So this is now like, I know Microsoft is all co-pilot, co-pilot,

co-pilot comes at us from a thousand different directions, but now we're beginning

to see the fruits of all of this stuff.

It's beginning to make our users lives so much easier and get it,

giving them an extra value value out of the applications that we build for them.

[14:10]

And I even think of some of the projects that we're working on,

I'm already, my head's already spinning and like, okay, we, now that we get

sort of the infrastructure there, we got the project built.

[14:19]

Now let's, let's start playing around with the co-pilot. So the users don't

have to go in and dig and find this information that's being stored.

They can actually ask it and it can tell them. And I think that's just going to open up a huge.

[14:33]

Huge amount of doors for for users that sometimes struggle

because a lot of these business applications there's a lot of information

there and there's a lot to go through and there's a lot to find out but this

is another avenue in to get that like that information out of the systems and

that's what they're designed for at the end of the day is to be helpful to give

you information to make good decisions so um exciting times and we'll sort of

again this is a constant state of the evolution.

I think every two weeks, Copilot has grown up a bunch more and we're seeing the results of that.

[15:05]

Yeah, definitely. It's so exciting. And the thought of having those kind of

agents, I know Eterra also launched a new Copilot or an AI service this week.

And it's exactly that thought that you have an agent by your side that you can

teach how to work for you.

And it also has a prompt engine in it and we

had this discussion earlier this week about prompting because

we've you know thinking about co-pilots and it's

coming into our workspace and we're kind of feeling a bit of

resistance towards it there's a bit of friction here but especially us two and

pilot and you know this people listen to this podcast we're not being too excited

about it um at times but we also see that we need to embrace it and we're talking

about you why Why is this friction here? What is it about it?

And we also talk to the fact that we're developers.

We want to write code. We want to develop and solve complex problems or issues.

[16:04]

And I'm not a prompt engineer because now I realize more and more that I've

been not diving deep enough and taking time to really learn how to prompt properly.

And I learned that when I started using the new tool that Eterra created,

because that will, you can create an agent and then you can give that agent

a name and then you can prompt it to give you a proper prompt.

Prompt and that's when I realized I'm such a

poor prompter because I would put in one sentence because

I'm bored very easily with these kind of things and the

description it would give me was just a massive sentence or you know chunk of

text so detailed and so meticulous and I was looking at this going I will never

be good at this because I don't have the patience to write this exact compact,

detailed prompt thing that it requires me to do in order to help me.

I'm a developer. I'm, this is not because if I was good at this,

then I would do something else.

I would be a scribe, an author, you know?

And so that's kind of the conversation that we had as well.

[17:16]

It's, it requires a different skill set than what most developers maybe have.

It reminds me when Google first sort of came out, you learned very quick how

to Google something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The plus and the minus and the brackets.

Just sort of to get that head wrapped around. Yeah, you're right.

Because for me, it's just sort of like, you know, like you plug in an error

message into Google and you expect and you find a bunch of these links and you

still have to go through and find this.

Like now to go into Copilot, like I actually have on my desktop a formula to

to kind of put together prompts.

And it's a lot of work because you have to, you know, identify your persona.

What is it that you want to do? What format do you want to do? out

and all these specifics like co-pilot's great but

co-pilot also says explain it to me like i'm a five-year-old it

like explained all this stuff and you have

to give it all this information and you're right it it takes

it takes a bit to compile that and put that in a

comprehensive thought or prompt to get

your co-pilot to or sorry chat gpt or

any of these ai tools to give you the response you

want and then yes it sometimes is iterative uh but it is you know these are

the these are of the things as we're learning it's like when i know initially

when they talk about this at all you got to be good prompt engineer like let's

just asking questions like i'm not stupid i can ask questions and you realize

oh but it's how you ask the questions to get the information out and again that's

getting easier and there's.

[18:37]

Co-pilots to help you make co-pilots so yeah

and there's um yeah co-pilots to help you make good

prompts for co-pilots and then it kind of i'm bored

halfway there so yeah no

so it's high note definitely but you know also a realization that it requires

a different skill set than being a developer to write good prompts in my head

at least sorry all right moving on um uh yeah Updates for modernization for theming for Power Apps,

more specifically Canvas apps, were released last week.

It's more of an update from Microsoft's announcement that now you're able to

do custom theming in Canvas apps.

You have the color theme, and it applies to all the modern controls.

Finally, you also have a new toolbar control and new icons.

And they don't work for for classic

as it called not legacy not old but classic controls

yet but they're working on it and i think that's kind of a fullness

of time type thing um but yeah it looks slick and it's what we've been using

the the uh the branding starter template thing for for ages so it's good to

finally see that in the app in the studio as well so yes definitely start using that Cool.

[19:59]

All right. So the other thing, kind of popping back to the co-pilot question

or whatever, and the other thing that co-pilots are good for,

AI is good for, is explaining how things work.

[20:15]

So this is something actually for power pages. And this actually came out a

while ago, but it kind of slipped under the radar.

It was actually late February when this blog post came out. And I only noticed

it this week as I was going through stuff.

But how many, like, I don't know about you, but I find a lot of times I learn

something by looking at what someone else has done, an example code or something

that someone has built before.

But then sometimes you're looking at code or even sample code and docs, and you're like.

[20:44]

What is it that they're trying to do here? Oh, that never happens. Oh, no?

Okay. Well, for me, it's like, what is this going on?

So now they have within the copilot for PowerPages and Visual Studio,

which also I think is pretty powerful.

It's one of these ones that can generate good code. It has like this explain code feature support.

And I know they have this in the GitHub copilot and some of these other ones,

but now it's in the PowerPages one.

So you can actually highlight a bit of code and say, okay, explain this to me.

And it will, in a chat panel, provide you a response of what that code is doing

and what it's supposed to do and what it's there for.

So that's really cool, you know, to be able to, again, this is where AI is taking us.

AI is not only helping us, you know, find answers or find things,

but also explain things that we've already found or explain code.

[21:35]

So anyways, very, very cool things. The Code Explainer and Power Pages,

we have the link in the show notes. So, again, like we always say, check it out.

Yeah, check it out. And then maybe that also can help you if something happens

to Power Pages the way that it happens with Power Fx now.

Very poor segue, but I tried.

[21:54]

So I have a question. I haven't done a lot of work with Power Fx.

I'm, like I've said before in this podcast, I struggle to wrap my head around the...

Not the imperative and the, yeah, the declarative and, you know, that kind of thing.

So I saw something this week that now in Power Fx, they're changing the syntax

for strings and the way that you call columns in Dataverse, for instance.

So they're going away from quotes and double quotes.

You can stop using that for strings or it's the other way around.

And you can now now call columns in Dataverse by display names,

not logical names, for instance.

Now, I looked at this and I went, well, this is just confusing for first.

I would love to actually pick the logical name instead of the display name,

because that's more accurate and specific.

So that's a weird change in my head.

And also the single quote, double quote, what does this mean?

Are they going to, can they just change syntax? And then what happens to the original apps?

You've been working with this more than I have. Can you enlighten me, please?

I could try my best. Like they say it's in the blog posts we're looking at,

it says it's a small syntax change.

[23:12]

But also it's about, you know, there's certain impacted functions,

the add columns, drop columns, rename columns, show columns,

the search group, group by, data source info. info.

And they show an example of like an existing formula, which is using quotes.

And then the second one is not using quotes.

[23:29]

Subtle but important difference. And it just again, it's about the impression of using power effects.

And like thing is, power effects is still evolving. It is open source.

So they are collecting feedback on how people are using it and things like that.

But of course, I know you had this concern. And I mean, maybe we don't quite

agree. And maybe just the wording of the blog post here,

Because there's this concern of, oh, if you're making this syntax change,

are you going to break all the existing apps in the world?

And then basically, you know, something that is built into Power Facts or how

they're implementing it is these things will be automatically updated to the new syntax.

But saying here when it's loaded into Studio or after version 3.2.4.2,

and basically saying in general, you don't need to do anything except start

using the new syntax for new formulas.

Meaning i read this as all of

your existing apps that are out in the wild will continue to

work fine what you may notice if you go in to make an

update or change when you load it up it actually is going to appear in the new

syntax but still that being said i think we probably have trust issues sometimes

with these things because i don't again i know i've said this before i don't

want to shock anybody but every so often microsoft rolls out something that

doesn't quite work as expected.

[24:47]

There's no indication that this is the case here.

But it is just good to be aware of these things. And as they're evolving Power

Facts, and the changes they're making, just to, this is something that we as

Power Facts developers,

if there is such a thing, you need to be on top of these things as this language is evolving.

And I am, I'm in the middle of learning more and more more power effects each, each week.

And I was sort of like, I think where you are now, my head just couldn't wrap

around the pushing and the pulling and the imperative and the declarative.

I'm getting much more comfortable with those concepts now that I've been actually

hands on fingers on keyboards working with this.

Um, I'm kind of moving from the, I no longer hate power effects.

And that's actually, I put in a couple of session, uh, uh,

session submissions and the The title is I used to hate power effects because

I think there's a lot of people like you that are out there that are still struggling

with it coming from our code backgrounds.

Like at the end of the day, I'm looking at certain things in power effects. I'm like,

I could do this in JavaScript faster. Yeah. But then there's other things when I look at it.

Okay, once you actually get it implemented, like, well, this is actually pretty

elegant in how it works and everything like that.

But it is a journey.

It is a process.

[26:05]

But all that being said is we also need to keep on top of these changes that

are coming from Microsoft or the PowerFx community as they're evolving this language as well.

So there is this article about changing the column names into strings.

You know removing the double quotes the escaping and things like that.

[26:24]

Because and that also these changes also affect

people who have written blog posts I know if I look at

a blog post from a couple years ago I'm already okay has

it changed is it updated now is it different now

so these are that's just sort of the world

we live in right now is things are changing so fast that

we need the content needs to be fresh uh

all the time and sometimes older content

no longer applies yeah and we should all do what megan walker does when she

has a disclaimer on top of all her blog posts that this was accurate at the

time that i wrote it tomorrow it may be outdated and it's up to you to know

um but i just want to to call out it says i'm reading the description.

Your apps will be automatically updated to the new syntax when they are loaded

into Studio at or after version 3.2.4.

That means, how I read it, you need to load the app into Studio at or after

version something something for it to be updated.

Now what happens to the apps in production when this takes effect?

I don't know. So if you have a lot of apps and a lot of of Power Fx in production,

it may be a good idea to look into it more.

Right. Be aware of it. I think they'll keep working.

I'll think they will keep working just fine, but it's still good to be aware of these things. Yeah.

[27:50]

Personal Pipelines Pros and Cons

[27:47]

That's what we're here for, to alert you about these things.

[27:50]

Okay. Another thing that I saw this past week was Personal Pipelines by Matt Collins-Jones.

Personal Power Pack from pipelines, are they worth it?

Now, if you wonder what this is, you may have seen this. If you've tried to

export a solution the last couple of weeks, you saw this green little pop-up

modal thing come up with a rocket ship saying, oh, there's a better way of doing this now.

You don't have to export and import your solution.

You can push it to the destination environment using pipelines now and that's

personal pipelines um so matt goes through the pros and the cons of using personal

pipelines it's been ranted about in the community for a while i will tell you and his,

positives five out doesn't really outweigh the negatives 10 items 10 10 bullet points that he.

[28:47]

It's also, he also points out that this is a preview feature and marks out very,

very clear that you should not use preview features in production or in,

you know, in your real world work.

And this pops up in my environments as well. This, you want to do this faster,

smarter thing. So that's also kind of counterintuitive.

You're pushing this new thing on us. It's still in preview and it doesn't say

it's preview on the thing.

Yeah. So I'm kind of with Matt. It's no spoilers that the conclusion is don't use it.

[29:20]

Go about your, do it the proper way, make the proper ALM, the pipeline host

yourself and do this a proper way.

That is kind of his and my take on it.

I'm doing an ALM session using platform pipelines at ColorPile next week or this week, actually.

Um so yes i'm on board with what

you're saying colin and or sorry matt um for for

about personal pipelines for sure i think this

probably goes in the category of it depends on your

situation um but i i kind of agree like for me if i'm doing anything i set up

the the host environment with pipelines and go through the whole proper thing

um but this is just again for those folks that that are still exporting and

importing their solutions.

But you're right. I look at this and I'm like, okay, this is probably something

I'm personally not going to use myself.

Yeah. Just for a lot of the reasons why he laid it out. Yeah.

But again, but there's also, I know there's people in the world that are still

exporting a solution to a file, wait for the export to be done, re-importing it.

[30:31]

This maybe helps smooth the road or at least gives, opens the door to pipelines.

Pipelines and then they can say oh if this works so

well what they hit those limitations then that

kind of maybe gives them that run that nudge into using the proper or the the

pipelines that you and i use in our projects i don't know that's just an opinion

yeah and you're entitled to have your own opinion but if you are tempted to

[30:58]

Watch Component for Debugging

[30:53]

use it read matt's blog post first let's put it like that Okay.

Right. So moving on, we do have another thing on the list.

[31:05]

Watch component. Yes. Okay. So this I got excited.

This is, yeah, this is my, so basically I've been working, I've been doing some

embedded custom, doing some custom pages work, some embedded canvas apps,

model driven apps, which is great, great technology.

Technology, but what the custom pages are, if you're interacting with getting

information from Dataverse within the context of a model-driven app.

So think of things like pop-ups or custom dialogues.

[31:35]

To debug these is a royal pain in the butt, because usually if you're debugging

a Canvas app on its own, then you can look at the variables and things like that.

But when you're doing a custom page, because you're relying on data that's being

passed into your app and everything, what you end up doing is you'll create

like another panel or you'll create little labels that are going to hold the

values of variables as you're debugging.

Debugging so andrew batenko a good

friend of ours um put together this um

this this component it's a

pcf component you can add into your custom pages that you can actually access

and look at some of your variables and things like that so for debugging custom

pages just got so much more easier uh using his stuff so i'm kind of got really

when i saw that i was like oh this is so so brilliant.

This is something I wish I had two weeks ago when I was right in the middle

working on a custom page component.

So yeah, definitely. And yeah, check out Andrew's stuff. The guy's a brilliant developer.

Just a super smart guy, really good guy.

[32:44]

ALM Updates and Enhancements

[32:40]

Andrew, thanks for building this. That's very cool. All right.

So there's, we have three minutes left before you have to go in a meeting.

Do you want to talk about the ALM update before we just head off? Yeah, absolutely.

So ALM, but new, basically a whole bunch of new stuff to kind of help with,

you know, again, this kind of goes back into the pipelines and things,

but a couple of things that caught my eye cross geo app deployment,

because right now, if you are

deploying something from one environment to another using the pipeline,

the proper pipeline setup that we're fans of, you still actually have to have

both your environments in the same geography.

They both have to be in the Europe or have to be in North America because I

know that I've set up stuff in the North American environment,

a developer environment. I wanted to push it over to European environment.

I couldn't do it with pipelines. Now I can. I can turn on the cross geo app

deployment. Yes. Finally.

And then also, of course, we already talked about the preferred solution.

We're already using that in projects. projects.

That's there as well to make sure that everything you create goes into the proper.

[33:46]

Solution that helps the ALM and dependencies and all the other headaches that happen.

One thing that you already knew about, and I didn't, that I learned when I'm

reading through this was the ability to save flows, even if they're not quite working.

What used to drive me nuts is like my flow is broken. There's a big error message.

But again, like now I have a meeting to jump into, I have to minimize it or

I have to remove the error and leave it in an incomplete state and save and move on.

Now we can save it in a draft even if it's not working and then pick up where

we left off. So that's pretty exciting.

And then other things like turning on the solution checkers and then basically

other things about the sharing limits and trying to get the deployments and the settings.

[34:31]

A lot of cool stuff. We have the link in the show notes as well.

But yeah, definitely the ALM story and Power Platform is just evolving.

Again, it's one of these things every few weeks, the ALM story evolves.

And it's so much better than, you know, the PowerShell commands I was using

five years ago to move solutions around and try to get all that configured and

trying to configure up in a new environment. Yeah, it can't really compare.

And it's getting better every week. It's very impressive, the amount of investments

[35:10]

ColorCloud and Future Speaking Engagements

[35:07]

they're making. Right. So let's wrap this up.

ColorCloud this week, there's a discount code. We'll put that in the show notes.

Make sure to check out the hair coloring and donate to the color challenge.

[35:21]

You're speaking at DynamicsCon, DynamicsMinds and CollabDays.

In Netherlands, yes. And Resco next.

We have a joint session at EPBC. And get 10% off your ticket with the discount code BOOST for EPBC.

The only two-day ticket remaining because the workshops are sold out.

And our next episode will be May 1st. Can you imagine? May already.

Wow. Wow. Okay. So have a wonderful day, people. And we'll catch you later.

Bye. Thank you for listening.

If you liked this episode, please make sure you share it with your friends and

colleagues in the community.

And be sure to leave a rating or a review on your favorite streaming service.

That makes it easier for others to find us.

Follow us on social platforms and make sure you don't miss a single episode.

Thank you for listening to the Power Platform Boost podcast with your hosts,

Lurik Akebek and Nick Dolman.

See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates. .

[36:27]

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