Power Platform Boost Podcast

Updates and Dad Jokes (#48)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman • Season 1 • Episode 48

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[0:00] What does Santa pay every month? I don't know. Jingle bells. Jingle bills.

[0:08] Jingle bills. Pum pumps. Okay. What type of cars do elves drive? Electrical cars. Oh, that's good. No, the answer is Toyotas, but I like your answer as well. That's it. All right. One last one to round it up. So what do you get? Actually, this should go to the cats here. What do you get when you eat Christmas decorations? Banking. Pinsulitis. And this is one of those where you have to explain because I don't know what that is. Oh!

[0:58] Music.

[1:17] Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Power Platform Boost podcast, your timely source of Power Platform news and updates with your hosts, Nick Doelman and Ulrikke Akerbæk. Hi, Nick. Hello. Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. How are you? I'm doing good, thanks. So this episode is being released on Christmas Day, right? That's their plan?

[1:44] Yeah, 25th. Wednesday. We keep our schedule, people. Even during Christmas, we provide you with this. So hopefully now you're in your good chair. Sorry. Yeah, you're in your Christmas pajamas and you're gathered around the fire with the family, listening to another episode of the Power Platform Boost podcast. Hopefully not when you're gathering with your family maybe when you're on your own having a break with your little eggnog and you know just sitting there in your good chair and you have nothing to do and you can listen to us you're getting out of the house because everybody's driving you crazy who knows everybody celebrates or when you have to clear the good driveway of snow for instance like so uh we asked last time we asked people to tell us what they're doing when they're listening to us. And a few of you came back to us. And Neil Benson, he was ironing the curtains for his new studio while he was listening to us. I love that. And of course, we know that Rory Neary does his gardening usually when he listens to us. Or maybe it's the other way around. But this time, he did say that this time when he was listening to us, he was, I think, wandering around Copenhagen or something in the Christmas markets. I couldn't find the post where he posted it last night but I was trying to find exactly what he was doing, but we know. So Rory, we're hoping that you're joining.

[3:11] Sorry. You remember? Okay. No, no. I met Rory this week because we were at the Christmas party in London for the UK user group. And Rory was there, so we sat down. I got to flip through his drawing book. Wow. Rory, you're so talented. I looked through all the sketches that he'd done and he can explain to me how he's evolved and the new techniques that he's learned. They're so amazing. And again, just from the bottom of our hearts, the songs that you sing for the community, Rory, it just blows me away every time.

[3:50] That's true bravery. Very much. And also we talked about, so one of the videos, actually they posted the day that I met him on Wednesday. And that was in the middle of a crowd in the Christmas market somewhere. He's in selfie video mode, surrounded by people, and he sings a song. And for me, I can't even pull up my phone to do a selfie in public. So just the, when I asked him about it, do you feel that at all? Do you even have that, that you think it's a bit awkward? Or he's like, yeah, yeah, I really have to put myself out there to do it, but I do it. Okay, that's the difference between you and me then, because I can't do it. Yeah, like I said, true bravery, just putting yourself out there, just doing your thing. Yeah, I'm amazed and I'm impressed and just in awe of what you do, Rory. So thank you.

[4:51] Yeah um it yeah it's interesting we'll talk a little oh go on yeah because i wanted to do it now can you please do it now now that they were talking about it do what the crmk crmk song because other people also sing so there's a bunch of people at crmk uh and i saw this because you I posted it in the show notes. They also sing a song, a Christmas song.

[5:22] They've been doing this for years. Oh, I haven't seen that. But I know that Catarina and Gustav, they sing in a choir. They love singing. Gustav's always with us when we do karaoke. So I know that they sing. But Jesus is so funny because we know so many of the ZRNK people around this Christmas day. They kind of film it and you hear Ravel's voices. And it's so sweet. Oh, I love it.

[5:49] It's amazing. And I think the first year they did it, they did like Let It Flow, Let It Flow or something. And this year was like Power Apps. It was just, yeah, we'll put the link in the show notes so you can actually see the video of them singing. It's pretty impressive. It's become a tradition now, right? So it's going to be something they're going to have to do every year. Yeah and now that benedicts is starting a branch of the company in germany i wonder maybe they have to pick it up maybe it's going to be one of those things right you know and there's got two versions maybe a competent run and let's see where that's going the challenge for you benedict to keep that tradition going because i guess it's a crmk tradition so yeah it's going to be interesting to see well yep i forgot to rearrange my screen so that i'm going to do that now while you get ready to dive in and this time i've been so busy it's actually it's mostly nick's uh links in here so i've done a quick read through so thank you for pulling all of this in here yeah yeah no no problem at all this is what we do because there are weeks where i get busy and you put all the links and well we're just going to talk about this stuff anyway so i even like kind of broken out in different categories i don't know

[7:03] if you saw that in or OneNote as well. I saw that. Very structured. I'm impressed.

[7:09] So first off, Copilot Studio to Agents. So there's a few articles there. First off, I want to talk about the Getting Started with Prompt Library, which was put out by, I think one of the GM, Richard Riley.

[7:22] And really, it's just, it's basically, it's a whole, actually, no, I got the wrong link there. Did I? No, the AI Builder Prompt Library link. get started with prompt library. You can get to it from Power Apps and Power Automate in the left-hand menu, AI prompts.

[7:45] So I find that a lot of people don't know that they can get to other resources from that left menu because the three dots and then you find a whole whack of other things and you can choose what you pin and what you do on the left side, what you have on the left side menu. You can choose that for yourself. And of course, when new stuff's added to that menu, you don't see it right away because you only have your things pinned, right? So it's a good habit of going into and checking what's new, if it's something that's shown up since the last time you saw it every now and again, just to kind of get a feel of what's there. This is one of the things that has popped up. Right. Okay. I see where I got confused because Richard Riley did the blog post for the other one about the agents pre-built for Copilot Studio. And I put his name against the AI. Okay. I'm all on board now. Right. So the first link is linked to docs. Yes. Yeah. But it's a new document as well about the prompt library AI builder. That's okay. Now I'm on track. So yes. Okay. Good. Yes.

[8:53] I haven't yet because I have been looking into it. I have seen this in demos and stuff. I've seen Eliza when I was working at Directions where we helped her. I was a proctor in her co-pilot studio lab that she did. She was using the prompt builder for a few of the exercises. So, yeah, it's a pretty neat thing that you can use as part of AI builder and be able to reuse these things and kind of build your own like templates and prompts. I think AI Builder is one of those things that were kind of, it was there for a while, but then I think now in 2025, I think we're going to be doing a lot more in AI Builder. Finally, I think it's one of those really cool features of our platform that just never really got much attention. And now, of course, Co-Pilot Studios kind of come in and stole the spotlight, but AI Builder is still a very important component in the overall structuring as you're building business applications and things like the prompt library can only help make it better.

[9:54] Oh, yeah. And I actually, it's weird. I talk to customers and they still think that AI features is advanced. And no, no, yeah, let's do that for phase two. It's something that they kind of need to mature, kind of build up to do. But I keep trying to convince them that AI builder is actually so accessible and has so many use cases, especially for, for instance, just a reading data of structured documents, for instance. That's been around for five years or something. We played around with this like ages ago. And so that is actually matured and tried and tested. It's not new. It's been here for a while. And it's very easy to get started with. But because it's AI, people think it's kind of one of those things that they, I think what it actually is, is that they don't feel confident as soon as you mentioned AI, if they're not there themselves. So I usually have to kind of create a simple POC just to show them how accessible that actually is. And then usually the penny drops and they go, oh, okay. So it's, ah, right. I thought we had to do machine learning and have all this data. And well, no, actually not. You can train a model on just a few samples, actually.

[11:08] And also, I found some of the companies where we wanted to get started and created in POC, all the credits were used up. Because people have been playing around with it. And you run through those credits pretty fast if you're not careful. And I also saw someone posting the other week about how you can now actually go in and edit it from or set a setting in the Power Platform Admin Center to say that you don't allow people to use those credits for everything. You can specify who can actually use it. So it's a way to kind of protect the capacity a little bit. I was going to say, because I did explore an ad builder a couple of years ago for a potential client. And at that time, the licensing was the barrier because the licensing needed a $500 commitment or something. Thankfully, now there's AI builder credits included, I believe, in the Power Automate licensing somehow. This is not the licensing podcast, but it is more accessible at least to build those POCs and try it out.

[12:10] Especially if you're dealing with reading a lot of information or even scanning invoices. Every business, like even me as a business, I get invoices. Need to scan and log and things like that so these are the types of things ai builder this is a great place to start with ai builder and then build up from there or if you're, needing to to read a lot of information i've worked with organizations that you know fill out collect a lot of information from the field um in terms of like wage subsidies and things like this well here's this all this information we can now process it through ai builder and categorize it and be able to generate you know maybe not so much reporting but stats on written documentation so So there's all sorts of neat use cases for AI builder just to get started with the basics and then build up from there.

[12:54] Yeah, yeah, 100%. And we kind of diverged a little bit off the topic because actually it is a prompt library. So have you looked at it? Have you used it? No, you haven't? No. No, okay. I've looked at it from a high level, but not an actual project yet. Right, yeah. No, no, no. No, me neither. But also we have a blog article from Eric Silvey where he explains, I love this. This is so much venturing into Eric's mind. This is how it works.

[13:28] It's a visual in the way that mind works. And I love that when they put that into a blog post, kind of describing how the evolution of Copilot Studio and Agents and how we got there and how the evolution's been through floor mopping. And I love the title. the title says Co-Pilot Studio and Power Automate had a baby like the subtitle yeah, let's celebrate yeah and he goes through it and kind of kind of get people on board on how the evolution happened and the different stages and how you can how you relate that to floor mopping so it was I think it was a good way to explain what it is and the evolution of it yeah and I'm seeing I'm having dinner with Eric later today so, yeah that's so sweet you have to say hi from me for sure.

[14:21] So this is the one that Richard Reilly wrote. Yeah, Explore Agents Pre-Built in Microsoft Copilot Studio. So this is not within AI Builder, but this is within Copilot Studio. These are prompt library. These are kind of agents sort of ready to go. And there's a whole bunch of agents that you could begin to use, like kind of like templates or examples. And that's what Microsoft sometimes does is, you know, in order to get people to a product let's give them a bunch of templates to either inspire or even to use and there's a whole bunch like a website q a a team navigator it help desk store operations case management safe travels uh we'll put the link so you see the full list but there's a whole bunch of lists there of agents that um that you could start using and then you know from that build up um again using copilot studio again you're seeing microsoft really trying to make it easy as possible for people to get into Copilot Studio and not only just slap in a website that you can query, but actually do more, especially with the agents. Like I said, 2025 is going to be the year of agents in. I've been doing a lot of like reading, researching, just trying to get my head wrapped around it and really trying to focus on particular business use cases so we could take to clients.

[15:38] Or to, you know, and get it out of the marketing hype and get it into the trenches and see how it can work. And also how it can't work. So we can make sure that we can relay that information as well. Because I think some people have this perception that this will do everything for me. Like, no, hopefully you can take some of the tedious out of your tasks. hopefully can make things a bit smoother um and it's it's it's interesting for me it's like it's been a big learning journey um i know i'm segwaying a little bit but i went on a a webinar that was hosted by donna and jeremy folks behind um third rodeo uh newsletter that comes out and it was a two-hour um kind of a webinar that i signed up for it was a paid thing but it was totally worth it for me because it really changed my perspective on a lot of things and they had like actual exercises and they went through prompts they gave a kind of a pre-homework this is donna sarker's thing right she always likes to give homework and i went through chat gpt kind of following this process and what it was it was an interview you had to say what your industry was and to help, at GPT coach you on this.

[16:49] And it actually went through and replicated a whole conversation that I would have with a potential client that's new to low-code technologies because that's what I put in as our platform solution architect. And it just blew me away, the questions it would come back with, and then I would give the response. And then it graded me at the end. It said I had an A- in that coaching session that kind of blew me away. But again, these are the types of things that ai is is good for so yeah we're we're seeing agents templates all these tools um and it's going to be uh it's going to be a year get your brains ready folks and i think we keep saying this but it's uh just getting your head wrapped around it and then folks close folks like eric and lisa crosby that are putting out content that that will help kind of piece these things together and put context to it i think it's super valuable.

[17:43] Yeah, absolutely. And having those templates to start, I think, also jogs a bit of creativity as well. And a lot of those use cases are use cases that we have been solving for 10 years or more. I mean, just looking at that list and thinking back to my SharePoint days, yeah, that's the same use cases that we used to solve with SharePoint, some of them. You know the the organization hierarchy the the travel request solution that like i said expenses there's so many things there it's not old it's just what every company or every organization needs um to to fix it's and also the tedious things that none of us want to do none of us want to make due expenses right so i've been sitting across from from then when we were at in London as well. I was asking, we were working and I said, what are you working on? Expenses. It's just, and it's like that, right? And especially now at the end of year, everyone has to put their expenses in. So these are all problems, all things that we just want to automate out of our heads and out of our world. So a lot of these are very low-hanging fruits in my world. If we can get ages to do this, yes, please.

[18:59] All right. Now, Flipping from the future back into the past,

[19:04] but into the future again, going into PowerApps. And this might sound a little bit like a corporate plug or a plug for a product, but it actually is an interesting story behind this. Because I think it was something that Thomas, I think Thomas Sansa, our friend, did bring up in a LinkedIn post at some point a while back. So it was news that the hierarchy control in model-driven PowerApps was being deprecated. Now, this hierarchy control came, I remember when they showed it off at a Microsoft event, and this is, this is back in the CRM, like four or 2011 days.

[19:39] And I saw this, like, this is so cool. This is visualizing data. Like in Abizio, you can actually see all the little things. And then I started playing with it and go, wait a minute, how I have an account, but I want to show cases underneath them. I remember the person from Microsoft, it might have been Nelson, but said, oh, no, no, no, this would just be the same tables for now. So you just have a hierarchy of accounts or hierarchy of the contacts. I'm like, yes, you just reduced about 80% of its usefulness by not having that hierarchy there, right? And then I hope that feedback was given back to Microsoft. And that's something, you know, if they say, oh, yeah, that's good feedback, we'll take it offline. And it never really happened. So here we are years later, that control, it's getting deprecated. Because, of course, when it's deprecated means they look at their analytics behind the scenes.

[20:25] Nobody's using it. Do they put resources to enhance it or support it? No. So let's just get rid of it deprecated. But then a lot of people were like, still, they're using it. I know Thomas said he was using it. But then there's also these other use cases. So Resco, who recently came out with a whole series of code components or PCF controls. And I know we have the PCF gallery, which is great. It's open source. But with Resco, the PCF controls that they're coming out with, they have a 1-800 number or an email or, you know, you get a license to this, you'd be able to get support from the Resco crew. And I've been at the Resco headquarters. They have a whole army of really smart people building these things and supporting these things. So it's a great way to enhance your projects. So they stepped up and they built a PC, a hierarchy control, PCF control. And I know our good friend Jacob was reaching out. He goes, oh, we're building this. What do you guys want? And I go like, more tables. I want to show like, you know, events and registrations and sessions and do-do-do-do. So that's what they've come up with. And they announced that it was Lucas Lesko, which I think he's the head.

[21:32] He's in charge of the team, one of the teams there. He posted out this blog article or this news release about their new hierarchy control. That's going to be available. So, yeah, it is a paid thing. And I do realize that. But, again, the value you would get from this in a project would just be amazing. So check that out. And if you compare it to having to build your own because they are deprecating the old one, then probably you'll end up with a much better experience if you get that. And then you'll get support and they'll get updated and they'll probably kind of keep keeping it alive. We're not going to talk about our PCF learning plan yet, how that's going along. So that wasn't for this episode. That was for the New Year's, wasn't it? Okay. Yeah. Hopefully. Hopefully. Yeah. That's what I thought that was it was. But yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, definitely. I'm going to build a PCF component. I have to because I'm going to use it as a POC for a customer. So I have to. I put so much pressure on myself from all angles just to make sure that I do it. So I need to do it. All right. Do you know what you're going to make yet? I know. I thought of a few ideas. I actually got to use ChatGPT to give me a learning plan.

[22:52] And it pulls up resources and things. Like I said, give me resources that I can use to learn practice and everything. So it did kind of come up with some steps. So that was pretty neat. Smart. That's about as far as I thought, to be honest. Yeah, well, then you're further along than me.

[23:09] Right. And also, sorry? Oh, go ahead. Yeah, and speaking of bashing your head against the wall, Well, Eugene von Staden posted a blog post that we, it's not often that we see this, but I like it. It's a blog post about a problem that is not solved.

[23:33] Yeah, this is what I wanted to do. This is what I thought was going to happen. This is what happened. This is how I troubleshooted it. This is the things that I tried, and it still doesn't work. And that's where he used it. And I absolutely love it. It's Power Pages with a cloud flow. You can create a cloud flow from Power Pages. You can add it to a button. That's what his use case is adding it to a button. Adding the Power Pages site to a solution. moving it with whatever you want to move it with as a managed solution into your new environment, spinning up the PowerPages site, pushing the button, and you get a forbidden, you cannot push or you cannot trigger this PowerAdmit flow from this PowerPages site. And when he dives into it, of course, he realizes that actually it is a copy of the other one in the other environment. So then, of course, it is then still tied to the old environment. He tries to update the metadata and edit it. And of course, then you get an unmanaged layer on top. And it still doesn't work. And so we asked the question, how are we supposed to do ALM with this? And now we've been bashing our head against the ALM wall with PowerPages and other things quite heavily this year.

[24:44] And I looked at it and I thought, okay, what we do, for instance, when we talked about this on the podcast before as well, we're identity providers and having different identity providers for different PowerPages sites, for instance. You used to be able to use deployment profiles. Now you have to kind of edit it manually for each site. And we do that with a Power Automate flow that would trigger every time a solution is deployed to production. We go in and we update that.

[25:11] So that is one thing. But did you, when you read through this, did any immediate solution or thing to try pop up in your head? Well, to be honest, to me, it's like, okay, this seems like this should be a bigger problem. This should be a more widespread problem, Ben. So I just wondered if Eugene was doing something wrong. And don't get me wrong, I met Eugene a couple years ago in New Zealand. Super bright guy. He was showing off the portal that he was working on and the things like that. It was truly amazing. And funny, he was showing me how they were doing at that time. This was four or five years ago, how they're doing their deployments with PowerPages. Before anything like the concept of pipelines or even the pack cli was around so he was already super smart guy um don't see enough content out of eugene he's uh he's one of super smart so of course i'm thinking if eugene can't figure this out then there is something wrong so i went in and tried it myself sure enough i set up to an environment i do have a kind of a pre-canned demo that I use Power Automate and Arpeges.

[26:15] Added everything to a solution, brought it over to a destination site and basically got the exact same thing that he did. Okay, so there's something wrong here. The only way I could get it going is I've actually went into that Power Automate settings. It basically kind of went in and resaved everything, which of course I think adds that unmanaged layer. Now I did get it working, but it was very cumbersome. But thankfully, Dilip, who's the principal PMs from Microsoft, did respond, acknowledged it as being an issue, and it looks like a fix is going to be rolled out to address this. So sometimes you just got to, you know, kind of raise the alarm and say, hey, this isn't working. And Microsoft will actually, you know, probably was already on their radar. I'm guessing this is already in the progress, but at least then now we know we have a fix. So folks, if you have an issue, don't be afraid to put on, I mean, as long as you're respectful and everything like that, just say, hey, this isn't working. The community will jump in or even Microsoft themselves will see that and jump in, hopefully address the issue.

[27:20] There's different avenues for that. So thanks, Eugene, for raising that. And it's going to be great because it's one of those really cool features in Power Pages that I think will just solve a lot of business use cases and beginning to use that a little bit more now. But it's interesting that we haven't, like, I know we're not using Power Automate in our solutions yet, but I think there might be some cases down the road where we're going to. So it's good that we get this, the road cleared for that.

[27:46] Yeah. And to be fair, it may show that actually that teacher isn't as much in use as we might think, because then maybe it would have been raised earlier. And I also know from work, I have said this tirelessly and I will say it again, working with juniors, when they hit a problem like this, they think it's their fault. They are all the time I see this, that they think that they did something wrong. They spend eons trying to figure out what mistake they made. But so this is our job as seniors and experienced people. And with this product, when we see something, we know this is not me misconfiguring something or not understanding something or doing something wrong. We know that it's the product. We need to let the product team know because so many people spend so much time thinking it's them. So in interest of time and other people's learning, I take that as a responsibility to let people know about that. And to be fair, it's not just junior people. I'm sure you've run into this, I know, right? I'm into this where did we do something wrong or is the software not working as it's supposed to? And sometimes that's kind of a hard thing to determine. Sometimes it's like, oh, yeah, you look at it like, okay, what am I doing wrong? Oh, shoot, I did it.

[29:03] Here's something here's a javascript that's misconstrued or i forgot to add the security setting that but then there are times you're going this a bug or is it just something i've done wrong and trying to figure that out so that's that takes experience and skill but it's this is where collaboration really helps asking somebody like we use the concept of rubber ducking and it's interesting i'm going to call out my wife again uh brigitte madu because she works in this and sometimes like i'll be walking down um to the basement to where she works and then she'll say hey can can you come over here and look at this for a second and then 90 of the time i don't say a word or anything she just figures it out because oh i forgot to do this or whatever it's this, concept of rubber ducky and i'm only calling her out because you tagged her last time on linkedin when we posted this and then she came to me she said um oh just because you tagged me doesn't mean you're going to listen to the podcast. Here we go. What does it take? Bridge, what does it take to get you to listen to this podcast, I wonder?

[30:06] I'm going to make it my mission to kind of figure out what it's going to take. I'm going to figure out exactly what you're working on. We're going to put some nice cheesy content in here for you, so you have to listen to it. Oh, what you can do is you can put it on in the car when you're driving later. Yeah. Oh, no, no, no, no. Oh. Okay. Nope. For people listening, we don't listen to this. We just put it out there. I have to listen to it once because I do the show notes based on the order of things. And that's awful enough. We've got to do an episode, the making of the Boost podcast and how this all works together. No, no, no, no, no, no, we don't, no, we don't, no, we don't. Okay, moving on.

[30:52] Power Automate. Now, this is interesting. This is from Heidi Nuenheiser. Neuheiser, again, Like what we do, we mispronounce names. Yeah. Yes. Heidi. Heidi's our friend. Heidi's so cool. I love Heidi. She is. Oh, yeah. She's amazing. So she posted something about Beyond the Buzz, like Power Automate outshines Copilot. And what I really liked about this is, and I found this the same way, as I'm going into learning Copilot, I'm trying to figure out agents to build. Sometimes I realize, you know what? I could solve this with just a straight up power automate flow using existing conductors. This doesn't need an agent.

[31:38] So I know, but she said it. So I really appreciate that. I love Heidi because she just says it as it is. It is Amy Holden as well. Same thing. Just say, just say it. I love that about our community. Yeah. Speak your mind because she's absolutely right. so many like i just said so many of these use cases that come up and it's on the list of the ai i don't know the agents list and like oh it's it's already sold we thought sold it 10 years ago with sharepoint but sure if you want to recreate it and have an agent do it yeah yeah absolutely go ahead and i didn't want to say anything but it's so true well yeah look at this big i could just see this demo something good look at this agent and look at all the stuff it does did it building it and then like yeah yeah that's like a three-step power automate flow does the same thing oh.

[32:31] But look, it's an edge, it's a near flashy thing. Oh, yeah. And then you have Microsoft going, yeah, you know, the future is an interface that has no user interface. In the future, we don't have any business applications.

[32:47] It's going to be AI everything. And I go, no, no, because you're missing the point.

[32:53] People do actually enjoy tactile things. things.

[32:57] That's why there's still magazines and newspapers out there. That's why pen and papers still exist. Because we as human beings like to touch things. It's not like, and I'm going to go on a tangent here because I remember so well working with SharePoint and then you had taxonomy and structured metadata and the tagging thing came along and everyone was like, you know what? Folder structure, people, is so last year. No one's going to use folders anymore. It's just going to be flat structures one library all the files are going to be in there and you're just going to use this massive taxonomy structure you tag all your documents and you're going to oh it's going to be awesome for searching and indexing and you're not you're never going to see a folder or a library again because you're just going to go into Delve and just going to search for things, yeah Delve is going to be deprecated I'm sure it's going to be removed sometime soon they were wrong we got all our customers in on it was such a rage and what happened And then the next time we looked at it, we went, everyone's using their, everyone's creating their own document libraries now with their folder structures, just the same folder structure that they have on the local server that we just turned off. Because guess what? People like the tactile structuring, organizing their things in folders. That's what we do with books as well. So thinking that we can get rid of user interfaces altogether, you don't understand humans very well.

[34:25] Thank you. No problem. I still use a folder structure in my OneDrive. There's still folders. There's still, yep, and pressing buttons. And, like, I have a stream deck. It's buttons. I can press buttons to do things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I use my Google Home all the time for voice, right? So I'm very much, I enjoy the interface of voice just because I'm a lazy beep, beep. So that's why I like it, because ask the weather, I can ask what this word means. I can ask it to translate something for me. I can ask me to add something to my shopping list. I don't have to fiddle with my phone for that. But when you work with something, you want the control, you want the fine tuning, you want the fingers on keyboard experience for certain things. I don't think that will go away. I don't think when you work, you do your work, the work that you do in Excel, They're just going to outsource that to something else when you need that finger on it control.

[35:28] So I'm... Nobs and levers. I needed to get it out and now it's out. Thank you very much. You can move on now. This is what this is. Remember, this is therapy, right? It is very much therapy. And every time I go in, I look at the list and I'll look at some of these articles and I think, I'm going to take this perspective on this article because I need to sound positive. I need to embrace this. And then my whole being is like.

[35:58] But yeah, sometimes it comes out. But yeah, moving on.

[36:02] Moving on. So yeah, I think some other stuff that came out. This came out two days ago. So have you used GitHub Copilot Visual Studio Code before? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm in love with that thing. Yeah, and this is because it's one of the great MVP benefits we get, right? So we actually, we do as MVPs, we do have access to the full on GitHub co-pilot for Visual Studio. So I absolutely love it. Just, you know, we just, I know we just shit on AI and all this other stuff, but now we're like, but we still love it because it does things helping generate code and everything. Yeah, it's like coding, buddy. I've learned so much from that. And there's a free version now. So yeah, so there's no excuse not to use this.

[36:49] Yeah, there wasn't really before either because I've heard seasoned developers say, actually, I can't code anymore without it because it's so slow. So it's become one of those essential tools for developers now. And we have to also speak to the big elephant in the room. Nothing is free. If something's free, you're the product. And usually when something's free, it's the bump usage. And then suddenly what happens? Everyone has to pay for it. So I'm not saying that's going to happen with this, but just keep in mind, nothing is free. But go ahead.

[37:27] So that was really cool. Now, I also, the other two things that I did want to shout out for is, you know, talk about tools like GitHub Copilot for sure. But in our community, so this is the things for those of you, two things I want to shout out. First of all, those of you who've done JavaScript and model driven apps, that's still, I know there are plugins for Visual Studio Code, but I've never really liked how the flow works. So I tend to use the XCOM toolbox, web resources manager, and I do my JavaScript in there, which of course doesn't have ColdPilot built in. It is a community tool by Tanguy, which is great. It works great because I can get the script off from my model-driven app. I can make adjustments. I can upload it. I can publish it, that kind of thing. Now, I got stuck with trying to do a tricky piece of JavaScript code where I needed to call some data from a couple levels down and do a few different things. And I thought, oh, I'm just going to get chat GPT to generate this, and I wrote a big long prompt of what I wanted, and sure enough, like, certainly, it spit out this code, and I was able to interpret, move things around, and it just wasn't quite working, and there was a few little things, and I was like, why isn't this working right, and just struggling, and the naming, and things like that, I even gave it the proper table names, and the field names that I was using to make sure the code would generate.

[38:51] And I was just kind of spinning my wheels, and then finally, I said, okay, I'm just going to go, and I went to the Dataverse REST Builder, which is by our good friend Guido Pritchie.

[39:02] He did this. It was based off something Jason Latimer did years ago. And this is the tool that I use a lot. I put in my parameters and literally 10 seconds later, it generated the code. I pasted that into my function, uploaded it and boom, worked right away. And I'm like, okay. So sometimes these AI tools and things like that kind of struggle with it. So I actually used ChatGPT to generate an image of a kind of a fighter with the Dataverse REST Builder logo knocking out the ChatGPT and posted it on LinkedIn, just to kind of highlight the importance of some of these tools and how valuable they are. Generated a few comments. It was interesting. Some folks said, yes, that it's great. Some said using a different language model actually does generate better JavaScript code for model-driven apps. So, you know, again, good discussion. I like that. Allows us to debate and discuss things and learn, right? So that's really cool. So, you know, thank you for that tool. I love it. It's always pinned on my browser. I use it a lot.

[40:10] The other tool that I don't know if we've ever really talked about it before. And to be honest, I've mentioned it to a few people.

[40:19] And this is the first week i used it it's called the the sql for cds now cds used to be common data service so it's really the ability to run sql statements against dataverse now i'm yeah as we know a little bit i like to say i'm classic but i came from a world where when i implemented great planes it was on sql server and then of course crm there was sql server behind there so a lot of the times we would use sql statements to retrieve data to do different data operations so i needed to actually dive in and do some analysis on some uh basically on solutions like where components living in solutions and all that that existed dataverse tables, trying to extract it and trying to dump things out and using even using fench xml was a little bit of a struggle so i ended up using this tool and just amazing i was able just to run sql statements and extract a lot of that information i'm going so it is called the sql for cds it's part of the xram toolbox um put out by mvp mark carrington um i don't know if you guys know mark mark's a great guy super smart um but it puts a lot into this tool um i think they have other tools as well but anyways uh the new version 9.5 is released so this is something that gets regularly updated so definitely something to have in your toolbox if you need to start looking at a lot of data.

[41:45] And if you're more coming from a world where you know SQL fairly well, or even using Copilot or ChatGPT, that's actually pretty good at generating SQL because it's so much data and information out there. So those two tools saved me a ton of time this week. Thank you, gentlemen. And again, support community tools.

[42:06] Yes, do. Buy them a beer or send them money. Fantastic. Yeah, they save our ass. So, yeah, let's pay back.

[42:17] So, we're, yeah, overtime, but that's okay. That's always. It's Christmas holidays, so maybe we should set the mark at 45 minutes now and not 30. So, we always go over.

[42:31] And that means we don't have time for a song or a poem or anything. So, we kind of just have to close it off. No, but I have the Christmas dad jokes, remember? Oh, yes, yes, you do. I do want to go through quick the events. Articulate the World Food Challenge, we are now fully booked, sold out. So January 23rd till 26th. And we have an MVP team that has signed up. So that's going to be epic. I can't wait. You're going to Tallinn? Yep and that's uh that's the weekend after so i actually got my flights booked and everything so going there uh doing a session on the developer's guide to power pages um i'm looking forward to the community there looks like a lot of great content uh my first time in estonia so another country off the checklist and uh looking and it's the first time i'll be presenting at talan as well That's because it's their third year doing stuff. So, yeah, looking forward to that.

[43:34] Some other news, Canadian Power Platform Summit is happening. The tickets are going to go on sale January 1st. So there's a fee. Make sure people show up because there is limited capacity. And then also we want to make sure the food and everything is covered. There's going to be two days. There's going to be a day of workshops that look really, definitely look really cool. So there'll be an extra fee for the workshops and then the sessions on the Saturday as well. And that's going to be Friday, Saturday, the weekend before MVP Summit in Seattle, right? Right. So there's actually a pretty high, good lineup of MVPs that will be participating as well as other folks. And I think there's a bit of a mentoring thing happening as well to get other folks in to the process as well. Sounds awesome. Perfect. And then we have Color Cloud in April. I'm doing a workshop and I'm doing a session.

[44:37] About Power Pages and Business Central. So that's pretty awesome. So I can't wait for that. So if you're looking for a Power Pages workshop, From start to production, from creation to production, that's the workshop for you. We're going to go through all the steps that you need to know about to get a portal from its infancy and all the way through to the teenage years, all into adulthood. And then we send it off. And then I have a session at Dynamics Minds. Something I've never done before. I'm still very anxious about presenting this. So we'll talk more about that later because it comes into, pulls up a lot of personal stuff. So we'll, we'll probably go for more into that later. That's a dynamics minds. They've released a whole bunch of new new sessions that are coming out and there's, and there's still, if you still want to speak, they are still accepting sessions, I believe until mid January. So there's still an opportunity.

[45:45] To be a part of that. And I know I have a whole bunch of other sessions. I'm hoping to do more than just this one session. But of course, as these events go and having, you know, be on the organizing side of the events, like literally don't feel bad if you don't get selected.

[45:59] As probably for every spot, there has to be probably 10 to 20 submissions. That's the ratio we're looking after. So keep trying to buddy up. There's plenty of events, but it's a bit of a competitive market out there right now. But there's other ways to get into. Community calls, I know they're always looking for content. Other online conferences, so get your foot in the door. And also there's a lot of mentoring with a lot of these events as well. So be able to, there's different ways you can get your foot in the door and get onto the speaking circuit. Yeah. All right, do you want to close it off with a few dad jokes? I'm prepared to laugh, but I'm also prepared to not get them. Because you've sent me a few of these. And for a few occasions, I've had to go back and go, this is funny because. And then you go, because, because, because. And then I go, I still don't get it. And sometimes it's a cultural thing. Sometimes it's a language thing. And sometimes it's just because it's tap jokes. Right. Well, it was also, not even getting to this, you didn't know what a potluck was. And I'm like, what do you mean you don't know what a potluck is? But we'll leave that. Potluck. If the listeners know what a potluck is, then let us know.

[47:17] I didn't know what it was. It's because it's a North American thing, because it comes from the indigenous people here, actually. That's what I learned yesterday. So I shouldn't know what it is. But also, when you explain the concept to me, we do have the same thing. Splice, a log, where everyone brings their own dish. and you kind of have to organize it so now everyone bring potato salad because that's the end of it. And then you all put it on a big table and everyone eats what they want to eat. And it's lovely. And that's what we call a potluck here. So anyways. Right. Okay. What does Santa pay every month? I don't know. Jingle bells. Jingle bills. Jingle bills.

[48:07] What type of cars do elves drive? Electrical cars. Oh, that's good. No, the answer is Toyotas, but I like your answer as well. Oh, fantastic. All right. One last one to round it up. So what do you get? Actually, this probably should go to the cats here. But what do you get when you eat Christmas decorations? Banking.

[48:40] Tinsulitis. And this is one of those we have to explain because I don't know what that is oh so like tinsel is the kind of shiny stuff you put on trees oh yeah okay oh funny.

[49:03] And with that let's close out 2034 thank you for all our listeners who have listened to us with a bowl on for 47 minutes about all sorts of stuff for all year as well. Oh, yeah, yeah. And for listening to all our rants and going on soapboxes and anger tantrums and everything. We absolutely appreciate you listening in every month or every month, every two weeks. Every two weeks. I'm going to go live. On Christmas Day as well. Even on Christmas Day. We hope you have a fantastic time. And even though even if you don't celebrate Christmas, we hope you have a fantastic time. And that, yeah. And we'll see you in the new year. Thank you so much. January 8th is our next episode. We'll see you then. I'll be so tanned and nice because I'm going to Spain. So that's going to be good.

[50:03] And with that. Okay. Bye-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, enter, 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, Lerika Akebeck and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.

[50:36] Music.


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