Power Platform Boost Podcast

BOOST Hair Club (#28)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman • Season 1 • Episode 28

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0:00 | 45:53

Ulrikke (00:01)
Hello everyone and welcome to the Power Platform Booth podcast. I don't have to say that anymore because we have made an intro that we're running each time. I just forgot. So I can say instead, I can say, hi Nick, how are you?

Nick (00:17)
Hey, Alika, how are you doing? So we're back in our regular spots.

Ulrikke (00:21)
Mm -hmm, we are. And I'm alone in the office, the Aterra office, because this is Monday. It's a bank holiday, so no one's here. So I can be recording out in the open. It's very nice. I have the river flowing past me. The sun is shining. It's so hot here. Spring has hit. Fantastic. Ah, I'm so happy. I had a run today in the sun, and I'm so worked up.

Nick (00:49)
Are you super excited?

Ulrikke (00:50)
I'm super excited. Oh yeah, so how's the other things your end? Because we're Canadians and Norwegians love to speak about the weather. So let's just check in. How's weather your end?

Nick (01:03)
The wet it's nice. It's sunny outside. It's warming up. It's yeah. Spring is here. We had the windows open over the weekend in the house. We're getting all that fresh air in. You know what it's like? You know, that first getting that spring air through and everything like that. So yeah, it's yeah, it's time to yeah. And then pretty soon we're going to be complaining about the heat. So we're we're well on our way moving into springtime.

Ulrikke (01:11)
Mmm.

Yeah, you can do that. I'm never complaining about heat. I never ever ever complained about heat or sun. Yeah, it's all good. Right, so we have had a couple of episodes where we have talked about a lot of other things than using updates. We have a bit of a backlog to get through and we do want to honor your time as well. So we want to make sure that we're not over.

our 30 minute mark, but I think maybe today will be a bit over and we have kind of a different strategy going here. So when I feel like I have a lot of things to talk about and not enough time, I will just say, okay, I'll limit what I say about each each thing so that you guys get an idea and then you can look things up yourself. Nick, on the other hand, wants to limit the things that he talks about and talk more or more about each thing. So we'll see if we get through all of Nick's things or my things. We'll see. So then.

Nick (02:12)
Hehehe

Ulrikke (02:17)
This is good, because then you get a bit of both.

And you're kick... You get to... It's on the top of the board! You get to start with more characters thing. Yeah. Go!

Nick (02:20)
Sure. So who gets to start?

Okay. Yeah, so we Mark Carrington. Okay, we're ready to go. Cool. So.

Ulrikke (02:33)
Is there a lag? Oh no, there's a lag. I hate it when there's a lag. You're just slow today.

Nick (02:38)
No, no. No, I think we're good. So it probably, yeah, yeah, definitely a little bit slow today. It's not a holiday here. Maybe. All right. We're talking about Mark Carrington. He posted a few weeks ago and he kind of noticed that the fetch XML documentation has been updated. Now these are things that might have been there already, but maybe not so much fully documented, but because they are, they are sort of.

Ulrikke (02:43)
Maybe I'm on double speed. Oh, of course. Okay, you go. Come on.

Nick (03:06)
You know, supported as well. So if you use fetch XML, there's a lot of new things. I'm not going to go through all of them because that would be an episode in itself. But to me, one of the cool things was be able to use fetch XML to do cross table comparison. So you could compare one thing in one table to the value of something in another table. Now, this is something that has always been, um, as part of SQL, but now this is part of fetch. So this also,

would help in creating your fetch XML statements if you're doing development and especially in things like Power Pages as well, which we do use a lot of fetch if we're building custom web templates. So like I said, check out that article by Mark. And I think there's a few others on fetch XML as well that kind of tie into this. So that's my first thing. So throwing the baton over to you.

Ulrikke (03:50)
Nice.

Well, thank you. So my next item on the list, I think this came out a few weeks ago, but it is around the Security Hub that is now private preview. Now, for those of you who haven't heard about the Security Hub yet, it is one stop shop for admins to look at security across the whole platform. It comes with new advanced data affiliation and protection features and use Microsoft Sentinel for Power Platform.

and integrates into the Power Platform apps and workflows and connections. So if you're into security and you're looking for this, then we have a link in the show notes to the Power Platform blog where you can read more about the security hub.

And there you go.

Nick (04:43)
Cool. Now this next thing, it says this is on my list, but I don't remember putting it here, but it still looks cool. It's, yeah, Anna Black, and she.

Ulrikke (04:51)
All right, let's look it up then. Anna Black, Pirate Platform Cookbook. No, maybe this is one of mine. So Anna, she's really on fire these days. She's publishing so many new cool things. I think this may be one of mine. So many blog posts. You really got digging in and making a lot of blog posts. It's called, she has a blog called Pirate Platform Cookbook, the Essential Pirate Platform in Dynamics 365 Recipe. So it's kind of like a cookbook recipe.

thing where she's collecting a lot of things that need to know about. So one of the blog posts that I put in the show notes is serving up a seamless deployment, my Go Live recipe. So this will take you through kind of the settings that she's making, what kind of configuration that she's doing to prepare her environment to go live. And so I just wanted to make sure that we shout out to Anna and for the brilliant work that she's doing. And yeah, this is actually one of mine.

Nick (05:50)
Hahaha!

Ulrikke (05:51)
So that I could just keep going and Benedict Bergman. I keep going because Benedict Bergman We're in the committee for Nordic Summit together and I know Benedict is I love his blog post and the community content that he puts out and he has made a blog post about environment versus source control strategy.

Nick (05:54)
Keep going.

Ulrikke (06:12)
So the thing is, because you've been working with us for a long while, we have had solutions always that you can export in from one environment and import into another, right? ALM, Application Life, Socket Management. It's something I'm really, for some reason, passionate about. I get passionate about a lot of things. So what he's doing is he's looking at that approach where you kind of push solutions downstream from one environment to another, test, you know, dev test prod.

And another new kind of way of looking at this is pushing from one environment to source code and then pushing from source code to the other environments. That's more of a developer way of looking at this maybe. And then you kind of have a third option if you look at those two. You can actually combine the two where you use Power Platform pipelines, for instance, will automatically download.

both an unmanaged and a managed solution for you. You can put that into your repo and have that in source control, but it also pushes the solutions through the downstream environments for you. That's kind of combining the two. And he's looking at each approach and he's looking at the pros and the cons for each of the approaches. And I really love the way that he's organized the blog post so easy to read and really a must -have if you're working with ALM and in the Power Platform.

Nick (07:34)
Very cool. Yeah. No, it's a, yeah, no, but it's amazing. Like I love his, his articles and stuff. We have very technical, but very, very approachable and easy to absorb his content. So, yeah.

Ulrikke (07:42)
Yeah, definitely. Oh, next one is also mine. And this has to do with this. So it's a segue to myself because this is blocked. Because you know, you can now you just keep laughing at me. This is my current mood. It's like my brain's wiring, firing off in all directions. OK, sorry, people. All right. So you know how you now can block unmanaged customizations in

Nick (07:49)
Yes.

You

Ulrikke (08:11)
environments in the Power Platform. So this is mainly for production. If you're trying to make a new app in your production environment with the blocking of unmanaged configurations or customizations enabled, it will tell you that you're not allowed to. It makes a lot of sense for a lot of scenarios, but what we've seen lately is a rush of blog posts and videos where people are picking this apart. Because if you have marketing, sorry,

Customer insights on your environment, that will create a lot of unmanaged layers. If you have Power Pages, you have Power Automates connected to that, that will try to create an unmanaged layer. It will actually stop you from using the environment the way that you're used to. It's not a perfect solution. So, Paravez Guadma made a blog post twofold. It's two blog posts that are connected about block unmanaged customizations, the bad news.

I really like this. So it's a three -part series that he's discussing where he's discussing the newly released feature. And so if you're looking into using this, make sure that you check out this blog post first so that you know what you're getting yourself into. And I think also Vivian Voss, last episode we talked about one of her blog posts as well where she goes through what actually breaks in Customer Insights when you have this enabled.

So definitely something to look out for. And then there's another segue here. Finally.

Nick (09:43)
And this is mine finally. Yeah, so pretty cool. Then this one it's a pipelines for for all public preview easily so that pipelines in the power platform. So of course we've we posted. I posted blogs on this myself and then I've gone through this many times of creating a pipeline to move stuff from one environment to the other. Now this looks like it's.

You know, if you're more of a pure maker and not really an ALM person to set that up, you need to set up a host environment. You need to set up a whole bunch of other things to make that pipeline work. You need like the environment IDs and there's a whole bit. It's not it not hard, but it's just a lot of tedious work to put that all together. You kind of got to know your way around the power platform environment. Now this seems like it's more of a type of a wizard kind of thing where you have a solution and you can actually.

tell it to go and create a pipeline for you. So basically, as soon as you get to the pipelines page, then you can actually create that pipeline yourself as a maker and then deploy it that way. So basically, this is sort of, you know, get some of that, that had worked away from the admins and put its back in the hands of the makers and then also helps them sort of adopt some of those healthy ALM practices. So yeah, pretty neat to see. I would definitely I'm going to check that out to see how that works. And.

That's just sort of saves people from doing the old downloading a zip file and uploading it. And do you remember if he uploaded it and where would you just save it and all these other things? So yes, very cool stuff.

Ulrikke (11:17)
Very good. And that was private preview. That means you have to, or public preview, you have to sign up and enable it for your, in your environment. So, yeah. Okay. So it's private, public now. Yeah. Okay. So I signed up for that a couple of weeks ago and then I had to actually register for it. But if it's public preview, then it's up for you to try. And you have another one coming up as well on the list.

Nick (11:22)
Now it's public preview.

No, it should be available for everybody. Yeah.

Yes, I do. So have you ever had to go through and create service principles?

Ulrikke (11:47)
Um, yes, I have.

Nick (11:51)
So you got to go through, you create your app as your app registration. You create the secret, you set the API permissions, you have to create an application user and you have to assign those permissions, the application user. And it's just, you know, it's a real, it's something you don't have to do every day, but it is something that's very tedious and you got to remember what you got to do. And, and of course people get confused because into the, like the app registrations, it's still, I think it's still called dynamic CRM.

in some places where, you know, we're like, but I don't use Cira. Am I building power apps? Well, yeah, it's sort of for the legacy and everything. Not today. Yeah.

Ulrikke (12:21)
Hmm.

Let's not go down that rabbit hole, please. It's for another day. Not today. But what you get in return is so cool. Do you want to do you think that everyone knows what a service principle is? You tell the people that don't know what it is.

Nick (12:41)
But tell the people, oh, like, oh yeah, why, why would I bother with the service principle? So then this way, you know what it's like. So maybe you've been in this position before you set up, let's just say even something like a power automate flow. You set this up, this flow you set up for your client, and then you move on to another project or you move on to a new job. And then all of a sudden that flow quits working because they disabled your account.

Ulrikke (13:05)
Mm -hmm.

Nick (13:06)
And then of course they're freaking out because it's like, Oh, why isn't this flow working? Oh, because no Nick left and we have to re -enable his account. Well, but that's going to use up a license and this and that and the other thing, do, do, do, do. So what are we going to do? This is where a service principle comes in. You set up a service principle. It becomes sort of the, you know, the, the application, it's like a non -interactive user, that application user. So you can use that service principle for running your flows and stuff and you don't have to worry.

about people leaving or getting shut off when they leave or their account gets activated. So of course you need to of course set up your flow to use that service principle, but first you need to create the service principle. And to do that, like I said, there's a whole bunch of steps. So Carl D'Souza posted a really interesting thing about using the PAC CLI. Now the PAC CLI is the Power Platform Command Line Interface, and it's a...

basically you run it in PowerShell. So yes, it is PowerShell coding. It's kind of command line base, which might be a little intimidating to some people, but it's really not that bad. Even if you follow his blog post, it's basically you just type in a set of commands and then it will go through and do all of these things for you. So basically all you need is the environment ID and then bing bang, boom, you know, just put all your ingredients in a pot and boom outcomes. The, the finished service principle for you.

Ulrikke (14:28)
Wow. But then your user needs to have access to make that in Azure anyways, right? So you're not enabling anyone that doesn't have the rights to do that in the first place. So it's still an admin task. It's just way easier to program it into kind of a pipeline. Or if you have some script that will enable or set up environments for you, you can also set up the service principles, kind of an admin tool to make things easier, right?

Nick (14:37)
Yes.

Ulrikke (14:56)
And did you say that the service principal can run flows and doesn't require license?

Nick (15:03)
No, no, no, you still need in your environment, you still need some licensing there. But in terms of the user that's, yeah, and I, yeah, this goes and I don't have my head fully wrapped around it, but you have a pool of flow runs and things like that. So it still pulls from that pool of flow runs that gets licensed through other users and that type of thing. So you still need, you still need the licensing somewhere, somehow.

but it's not so much it's tied to that user. Now there are, of course, using service principles, there are things like the Outlook connector, for example, you still need an actual mailbox user and stuff like that. But for other things, like yeah, the service principle is like for doing dataverse stuff. That's just sort of a way to, yeah.

Ulrikke (15:46)
Yeah, and it's not that long ago that we were enabled to use service principles for Dataverse, right? Because I've been using that for Azure stuff forever. And for, I think, for also graph, I've been using service principles, but I don't think we were able to do that up until recently. So it's...

Nick (16:07)
You could always set up a non -interactive user. And you could do that for years.

Ulrikke (16:11)
Yeah, but not a service principal.

Well, I'm not sure. Well, maybe I'm mistaken. And it has happened. Mm -hmm.

Nick (16:17)
I think it has been around just not well known, I guess.

Ulrikke (16:24)
Okay, well then. Well, and this up until now has been very admin heavy and we're not really popular from admins, any of us. We do a lot of admin stuff because we work with the platform. You're used to having all the hats and that includes the admin stuff. So we've all been working as admins, but we're not pure admins. And I think none of us really are. I think there's few people that are.

that their job is to be 100 % Power Platform admins. Usually, it's the person at the company that knows the most about Power Platform. You're responsible, because you know the most about it, and then you inherit those tasks. And so I don't know if that's the reason why, but I found a very good resource this week. And it's a blog series from Michael Roth and Craig White that's

called What Every Admin Should Know. It's on Michael and Rod's blog, as far as I know. I think it's a collaboration. And they talk about things like breaking glass accounts for where you have kind of this one account that is able to break glass, kind of break into all the other things. How to set up an account like that and how to make sure that that's protected well enough. Password management, and do's and don'ts for admin.

And just a quote from Craig says, did you know that 59 % of adults in the USA uses birthdays or names in their passwords? So that's according to top password statistics, and they have a link to it. So kind of those.

must knows, should knows, and best practices for admin in terms of, you know, from the private platform perspective and really, really great resource to get through. So if you have been assigned that hat because you're the most knowledgeable person about private platform in your organization, like someone else here is, then that's something you really should look at.

Nick (18:28)
Heh.

Yeah. Michael Ross blogs in general are required reading for anybody doing admin or governance in the power platform. Just his content is excellent. His, his presentations are phenomenal. If you're at a conference or user group and he's presenting, just go to his sessions. Totally worth it. Get front row, get your notebook ready and just be prepared to be bombarded with info.

Ulrikke (18:39)
Agreed.

Mm.

Yeah, I know. And such a great guy as well. So definitely. Yeah. Good. Next item on your list as on our list is yours. Is it PowerPage is what I did?

Nick (18:56)
Oh yeah, absolutely. All right.

Yeah, so it is Paragias related. It's interesting. I, uh...

Ulrikke (19:12)
I should sure hope that you think that that's interesting. Enough with the admin stuff already. We need to grab some PowerPages related stuff. Yeah. Go.

Nick (19:17)
It is interesting.

Well, there is some other PowerPages stuff, but one that's really interesting is the ability to... This one is a blog, and I'm just trying to go there, and of course it keeps trying to bump me through LinkedIn for some reason. Yes, but it...

Ulrikke (19:33)
because it's a LinkedIn link. But I did see this as well. Tell the people what you're looking at.

Nick (19:44)
So basically, what it is is the ability to add a camera control, which we could do in Power Apps forever, in Canvas Apps. But now it's adding it to a Power Pages site. So think about that. That's pretty interesting, because this way, if you're using Power Pages on a mobile device or something like that, or you want to upload images,

Before, you'd always have to take a picture, save it, and then upload it as a file into your Power Pages site. So this way, he's actually integrated that using into Power Pages. And it's kind of a genius how he's gone through and done that using the HTML5 camera control and built that into the Power Pages site to get those pictures up there. So a bit of coding involved.

Ulrikke (20:34)
Nice.

Nick (20:41)
a bit of this to display the variables and everything. The blog post is a whole bunch of different steps there to go through that whole bit. And that's by Namacy Navraturam, he's software engineer at King County. So yeah, great blog post. Definitely check that out. If this is something that's come across your, oh, I need to actually get this done and to do this list. So yeah.

Ulrikke (21:03)
And it's very cool to see how they're utilizing. So the HTML5 camera control will trigger the camera control on your phone and kind of that app thinking that we're mobile first in this day and age and PowerPages is built on Bitstrap 5, which is mobile first. And so you have all of these new capabilities that you don't often think about when you're building a website. So I love the fact that he's kind of bringing that in as well, that you can use that mobile, the native mobile.

features as well on your phone. So that's really cool. And, you know, yeah, just a great resource. I saw that as well, so it's nice that you put it in there.

have you guys heard about the X -RAM toolbox? Because that is another tool box, not a toy box. It's a toolbox. And one of the people that started building tools for the X -RAM toolbox.

very early on was Jonas Rapp, Swedish developer and part platform evangelists, one of the OGs in my book, at least. I'm still starstruck when I sit at restaurants with Jonas. And he made a blog post this week about hidden gem in fetch XML, fetch XML builder that he wrote back in the day. And I think maybe this is also spurred on by a podcast episode.

that they did, because there's a podcast called XRM Toolcast that was originally by Jonas Rapp and the other founding fathers of the XRM Toolbox to talk about the different tools that came up and stuff around that ecosystem of the XRM Toolbox. But now it's evolved to be a podcast about technology. I was actually recording an episode with Scott and Darryl just the other week. I know you were on the XRM Toolcast as well just a couple of months ago.

So it's kind of evolved into a bigger thing in the community. And I listened back to an episode that is a couple of months old, I think, with Mark Carrington and Chris Piesaki and Matt Beard, where they go through the different things of the X -ROM toolbox that they didn't know about. And these are people that have worked with and used this tool for ages and ages, and they were able to tell each other about...

hidden buttons and weird if you delete some file, if you delete the default connecting file that it actually force you to put things into connection lists and stuff I never thought about because I use this tool all the time and to get that from the experts and they actually teaching each other things, you know, throughout the episode. That was awesome. So even if you have listened, sorry, use Xtrem toolbox for ages and ages, chances are you'll listen to that episode.

and you'll learn something new. So both check out the episode from Jonas Rapp and also the episode of the X -Ram Toolkast, we'll put it in the show notes.

Nick (24:03)
That's amazing. I think we should have more of those sessions. Did you know that and see if because I think there's a lot of things that we didn't know.

Ulrikke (24:07)
Yes!

Exactly to that point, I also submitted to a couple of conferences this fall, session suggestions, and one of them is actually going through the Power Pages management app. Because to this day, I estimate half of the advanced functionality in Power Pages is still hidden in the PMA. People don't know, they had a list to it and they think, I wish this list could give me.

Nick (24:34)
Yes.

Ulrikke (24:38)
Something or a filter or something that you're not able to do through the designer I want to walk you guys through the advanced stuff that you can do it from from that So I think yeah, this is good. Let's get into the details and more into the advanced stuff for sure

Nick (24:54)
Yeah. So it's, uh, yeah, it's interesting. So you, you were on that podcast and we'll talk about another one in a few minutes. Uh, but then the other thing I noticed, I guess we are, we're jumping around a little bit, do we back to solutions? We probably put a thought through that solutions thing in the mix a little bit higher up, but this just came out, I think just this past week, but the ability to redeploy past solution versions using pipelines. Um,

That's cool because think about it. You, if you do your thing, do you deploy it? Everything's cool. Then you realize, Oh shoot, because of this new thing, we broke something else. Like this is, I think a lot of the work that we do fix one thing, break two more, um, happens a lot to, I think it happens to everybody at some point. Um, and then what do you do? You have to either fix the two things that got broke and keep the original thing fixed or.

Ulrikke (25:32)
Yeah.

hehe

Nick (25:51)
sometimes you need to roll back and rolling back in the power platform is a is very, it's one thing to deploy using solutions, but now we like, we need to roll back. So that means you have to like kind of get that previous solution and roll back and things like, it's a bit painful, but this gives you the ability now to roll back using the, the, the pipelines, meaning, Oh, we need to roll back to this version so we can actually.

Select the previous, go to the run history and then redeploy the previous version. So we also need to make sure that, and there's a new configuration option to allow redeployment of older versions because you know, sometimes you import a solution. It will say, Ooh, this is an older version or it's going to block you. So this is something I haven't tried yet, but I'm really, this was something that kind of came out of nowhere. And I'm really excited to see that. Like this is something that we've, we've probably been.

asking for in some way or another, but this is just going to make life a little bit easier when you do run into that issue like, oh shoot, we need to actually go back as opposed and then give you time to breathe and fix what needs to be fixed properly as opposed to scrambling and being in a reactive mode versus a proactive mode.

Ulrikke (26:50)
Mmm.

Yeah, absolutely. And it ties very well to the next thing that you have on this, on here as well. Let's just dive into that quickly. Solution dependencies.

Nick (27:18)
Oh, yeah, yeah. So basically, that's another thing. So anybody that's worked with working with solutions and stuff, how many times? Everybody put your hands up if you run into this, deploying a solution, and it says, oh, no, you're missing dependencies. Actually, over the weekend, on the project we're working on, one of the other folks did ping me and said, hey, we're missing stuff. Like...

Ulrikke (27:30)
Hehehehehe

Yeah.

Uh oh. Nyeh.

Nick (27:44)
Yeah. So that was a, that was a whole power pages thing, which I sorted out, but this is the great thing. This is something else that you have that new, we go, this was something that exists before where you could actually try to identify the dependencies for particular solution objects. But now it's a little bit better organized, easier to understand and has some new essential actions that you can take appropriate, um, actions, including, you know, you know, getting those dependencies in there or even removing the dependency. And what does that mean? Um,

Ulrikke (28:01)
Hmm.

Oh, wow. That's a big announcement.

Nick (28:14)
and focusing on, yeah, so what's kind of blocking and things like that. So that's something else to check out as well ties into that whole solution deployment, because that's one thing where, yes, you deploy the wrong solution, you need to roll back. But then there's, okay, we need to push the solution and it's not letting you because there's dependencies there that are missing. Of course, a lot of those dependencies get added accidentally by unmanaged layers that we talked about earlier, blocking that. Of course, you know,

Ulrikke (28:40)
Mm.

Nick (28:42)
We're still not in a complete perfect utopia yet, but these types of tools just help make our day so we can save hours trying to troubleshoot and try to figure out what's going on when we're rolling solutions through to our prod environments. So definitely check that out.

Ulrikke (28:56)
And we'll never get to that perfect world because we need that dynamic, we need the flexibility because different projects require different things and there are different dynamics and different teams. And the first thing that we had to sit down and agree upon when we started doing project, for instance, was what's our solution strategy like? What's our environment strategy like? Will all developers use their own developer environments and push to dev and then push to...

How do we want to work in this project? And you have to do that for every project because everything is different. And so the platform needs to be as flexible so that it allows for different things. And I think part of the block customized, the unmanaged layer is also for production. It's not meant for environments with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

It's not meant for that. It's meant for other things. And you can complain about that as much as you want. We have to look at the dynamic and the flexibility that that gives to someone that really needs that. That's perfect. That meets the requirement. And for all the other people that breaks half their solution, you don't use it. It's kind of, yeah, it's rah rah and complain, complain, rant, rant. But at the end of the day, you just have to pick what's right for your project, right?

Nick (30:15)
Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, but these tools just make it a little bit smoother.

Ulrikke (30:19)
Yeah, definitely. It's very, very good. And I feel so half the time when I, because I talk a lot about the Power Platform pipelines, because I do have sessions on that for a lot of conferences. And one of the things I hear the most is that, yes, this is one of the fact that you get alerted to the dependencies that you have to fix upfront when you use the Power Platform pipelines instead of after the fact. Because if you explore, if you...

your solution and you import it into another environment, you get a little alert when you import it to say that, oh, they're missing dependencies here. With platform pipelines, you get that warning upfront and it shows you what you're missing and what you have to do about it. So I think this is also one of those things where you get that message upfront and you can be a bit more proactive and I love it. So very, very good. Just to close things off, I have a couple of recommendations in terms of podcast episodes because I love listening to podcasts. So...

On Air and the Cloud, they have an episode with Chris Huntingford where they talk about the future of platform development and co -pilot and AI and what that means for us as developers. And he actually say something along the lines of, if you are looking at making Power Apps, Canvas Apps as your majority of the work that you want to do the next 10 years, you have to look at that again, because we're not going to...

be making apps that way for 10 years down the line. It's going to change. The way that we make apps, the way we look at developing apps is going to change. So if that's your primary work, then you have to re -look at that again. And also, so that's really a good episode to listen to. And I know you're on that podcast as well, right? You recorded something just a couple of weeks ago, yeah? Thanks.

Nick (32:10)
Yep, yeah, recorded with Keith last week and I'm not sure exactly when it's coming out, but yeah, we talked, yeah, we talked a whole whack of things. Talked about you too, so your ears might've been burning. So you'll have to see what it comes out. All good stuff, all good stuff.

Ulrikke (32:25)
Uh -oh, I hope they edit it out. I'm sure, I'm sure. All right, and also another thing I wanted to mention, because so I read a book ages and ages ago called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. And Mark Manson, the author of the book, he started a podcast where he brings on different guests and they talk about different topics. Now, he's a developer way back when, and then he was an entrepreneur and now he's an author, but.

He has a lot of good perspectives into what it's like to be working as a developer and as a technologist. And one of the guests that he had on recently was an author on a book, A Productivity Expert. And it's how to accomplish far more while working less. And that ties so well into what Chris was talking about on the air in the cloud.

and so many conversations that we had throughout MVP Summit with all of our fellow MEPs. And I see this in the community so much these days when technologists are afraid of their job and so many good things in that that ties to what we do every day. So, yeah, just wanted to mention that and we'll put links in the show notes, of course. And now...

We are on to the conference part of our podcast. I know that we're five minutes over. We need to take a few minutes to talk about the upcoming conferences that we're going to. And first up is CalloCloud. And we have a five euro discount. That's the first thing. So we both have a discount code for five euros off of your ticket price.

Nick (34:02)
Mm.

Ulrikke (34:09)
and we'll put that in the show notes. And there is a charity movement going on. Someone took the liberty of signing us up to a challenge when we're at CPBS.

Nick (34:29)
say that person was Matt's. I volunteered myself and then he just assumed that you were in too.

Ulrikke (34:30)
Yes, you did.

Yes, because you speak for me. You can make decisions on my behalf, of course. So Mats came up to me and he says, oh, you're so cool that you're in on this. Yeah, you're so, yeah, you're great. Thank you. And I go, well, what are you talking about? And he says, well, you're going to color your hair for ColorCloud. And I go, I'm going to do what now? And he said, yeah, well, Nick said you're in the podcast and all that. Thank you so much. And I went, and then I look at you and I went, I'm going to do what now?

Nick (35:01)
I did not.

Ulrikke (35:05)
So I'm happy to know that you make decisions on behalf of both of us and that you now got us into this mess. You want to tell the people what you got us into?

Nick (35:16)
So the idea, this is not how that story went at all. So basically, yeah, I think it started for Carl Cookson. It was a bet between him and Matz or something that if you're able to raise 1 ,000 euros, I'll color my hair thinking whatever. So it was sort of like, OK, game on. And so Cookie is already, so the way they've done it, they've

Ulrikke (35:23)
I know.

Nick (35:44)
this quarter kind of grew to mother people sort of signing up like Andrew Bibby, Sarah Lagerquist, William Dorrington. We're in there a few, like a few others. So there's a list. And then as the numbers go up, the goal is to reach 10 ,000 euros. And then every time they hit that milestone of a thousand euros, then the next person's up. So, so far where we're at, Carl Cookson is in, Andrew Bibby is in. I think now they're raising money for Sarah Lagerquist to be in. And then, and then eventually you'll get to a point where,

Ulrikke (36:09)
Yeah. Chris Huntingford is in there and they're going to do tattoos, right? So I think Anna and Chris are going to do tattoos. Not permanent ones.

Nick (36:17)
Yes.

Yeah, I think will will will might be in on that too, but this but it's it's not only that I guess they they get to pick the tattoo. So it's not like I mean, it's not like Chris is it's his first tattoo. I think this is probably his 100th basically, but it actually might even be a SharePoint tattoo. So who knows how that's going to.

Ulrikke (36:26)
Yeah, no, that's true.

And I saw a comment kind of section between Chris and Donna as well, because Chris said, maybe I'll just do the Copilot logo or icon. And then Donna wasn't having any of that. So yeah, we'll see what it ends up being. And actually, there's no rules or regulations in terms of what kind of color they're going to color their hair. So I think they're going to, we are probably going to.

dye our hair in whatever color we want. And as you said, as they put all of our names on the list and you kind of unlock people as you go along, I think at the bottom is Mark Christie and he's going to color his hair and beard bright red. So that's a 10 ,000 euro. So if you can get to that point, come on people, it's just yes. So that's where we want to go. I think we're at 5 ,000. So that's...

Nick (37:31)
Yep. Yeah, I think we're about halfway mark, so.

Ulrikke (37:37)
Yeah, so if people donate more than 5 ,000, then we have to dye our hair. And we were looking at, OK, what kind of colors do you want? And we're actually thinking about allowing our listeners, you guys, to make that decision. So next week, so we're posting this. This is going to go live on Wednesday. The week after, we usually do boost quests every week that we're not publishing an episode.

we're going to release some AI pictures of us with different hair colors. And if you make a donation to this Color Cloud charity, I don't know what do you call it, series or effort, then you get to vote what kind of color you want us to dye our hair. And if we get to that point where they actually want us to do it, then we'll just pick the colors that have the highest votes. How's that?

Nick (38:34)
Sounds good. Let's make it happen. It's for a good cause. Good causes. Yep.

Ulrikke (38:36)
Oh my God. It is, it is where a lot of good causes, I think, because all of us got to choose different charities to give to and then they just put all of those in, you know, for our names. And so the charity, the money that you give to that charity, or sorry, to that, this kind of, I don't know, we call it program or effort, it goes initiative. Thank you.

Nick (38:58)
Initiative.

Ulrikke (39:00)
It goes through to that charity that the person chose. So it's such a good thing and I just love the effort and yeah, absolutely. We're up for these kind of things. It's very fun to be a part of this.

Nick (39:15)
Absolutely. Cool. Alrighty. So yeah, there's a whole whack of other things coming up, which I think we've talked about already before of where we'll be and where we're going. So just in the essence of the fullness of time, we're already a little bit over where we should be, but.

Ulrikke (39:17)
Right. Um.

Yeah, absolutely. Definitely.

Yeah. And also, I know that we're over, but I want to take two minutes to talk about something that was a bit more personal. So if you just don't care and you've got your news and updates, you want to move on, that's completely fine. But I just wanted to take a few minutes to talk about the fact that we do appreciate us being in a position where we get to go to a lot of these conferences. We get to travel the world. We get to see the great community that we're a part of.

throughout the year. We're very privileged and we do recognize that. And both of us have kids. So you have a daughter, she's what, 15 now? Yeah, big girl. Yeah, a lot more independent. I have two kids, they're six and 11. Not so independent yet. And my boy, when I came back from Seattle and Canada last, he was in pieces. He...

Nick (40:15)
Yep. Yep.

Ulrikke (40:31)
was having such a hard time with me being away for that long. It was a week and a weekend. And he asked me desperately, can you please stop being away for so long at the time? And I made him a promise that I won't go away for more than a week. The year to come, we agreed that I could go away for a long weekend. He was fine with that. I kind of had this conversation with my six year old that, you know, he needs me and he needs me to be there. And we had...

Things planned, we had a very exciting opportunity at RASCO conference, for instance, RASCO Next that we kind of had to put a pin in, maybe we really set that next year. I did have other things that I was looking into being a part of that I had to cancel. And it is important to me to kind of also show that side of all the things that we get to do.

because we do have to think about the fact that we have families that are relying on us. And it looks so glamorous and we get to travel the world, it looks amazing. But there is also a time to dial it down, to take a step back and to kind of look at the whole schedule the whole year and make sure that you get that balance right. So yeah, I'm turning things down and there's a good reason for it.

Nick (41:50)
Yeah, and not just.

Yeah, and not just for our families, but for ourselves as well. Like sometimes just a break is needed too. And we get it, like we love it. I love traveling. I love being around the world, but it's just being present with the people that love you and you love them. So it's definitely important. And sometimes for yourself to take a bit of a breather and kind of settle. So all good and appreciate and thank you for sharing that.

Ulrikke (42:12)
Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. And in a couple of weeks, we're actually gonna combining the two. So you bring your family to Norway, we all get to meet and have fun and go troll hunting and barbecue, go sausages on sticks over an oprah fire and stick bread and you don't know what. I'm gonna introduce you to all the crazy Norwegian things that we do. We're gonna have so much fun. I can't wait for our families to finally meet and it's gonna be a lot of fun.

Nick (42:27)
Yeah.

I

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Sounds cool. All right.

Ulrikke (42:48)
Perfect. All right, so our next episode is going to be April 17th. And in the meantime, then week in between, make sure to look out for that Boost Quest where you get to vote for what color we're going to dye our hair. I can't wait to go into Midjourney or Microsoft Designer and just look, you know, make art and make those pictures. It's going to be so much fun. So, yeah, we'll see you then.

Nick (43:04)
I'm sorry.

Alright, sounds good. See ya.

Ulrikke (43:16)
Okay, yeah, perfect. See ya, bye.

Nick (43:20)
Bye.


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Nick Doelman

Host
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Ulrikke Akerbæk

Host