Power Platform Boost Podcast

BOOST Vibe

โ€ข Ulrikke Akerbรฆk and Nick Doelman โ€ข Season 1 โ€ข Episode 56

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April 24-25th
Ulrikke's Power Pages Workshop: "Power Pages: From creation to go-live!"
Session with Andy Wingate: "Business Central + Power Pages = TRUE" 

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May 13th - 16th
Nick's session on "Crash course in Power Platform Pipelines" 



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Ulrikke:

and sometimes I feel like, okay, so that's what it's like to be you, like that's us all the time. It's like I'll just come in there, just random, just hit you with a million different starts of sentences and you're left being like am I supposed to make sense of all this?

Nick:

but somehow you do, I, I, oh, all too well, we could. We could probably talk for about two hours on this, but we're uh, that's not the type of podcast we do.

Ulrikke:

I know, I just I we probably going to cut it out, but I just need to find the link to that Instagram. Paul's now share it with you because it's so much fun. I think people are going to relate to it. Okay, so sorry Digress, let's dive into the Sorry.

Nick:

Go ahead.

Ulrikke:

No, Okay. So people listening in every week now knows us well enough to kind of this is okay, I think. 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 Akerbรฆk. Hey, Hello, Hello, how are you?

Nick:

I'm good, thanks Another day.

Ulrikke:

Holy shit, what happened in AI the past two weeks. Are we going to rename the podcast anytime soon? Do you think?

Nick:

Well then, that means we have to update our tattoos as well. So maybe not we're still going to be boost, but maybe we're still going to be boost.

Ulrikke:

What about AI boost, copilot boost?

Nick:

I don't know, it could be anything boost yeah, or talk about food foodies like let's do that instead. That seems seems more fun boost foodie boost, right, okay?

Ulrikke:

um no, we're not going to do that, because we're all about power platform yet. At least maybe we just call it vibe boost, because then we can combine two things that we're going to talk about.

Nick:

So yeah, and that's kind of how we do this podcast right. We just sort of vibe with it, right, we get in. We just we have an idea of what we're going to do.

Ulrikke:

I get nauseous, it's just. I get nauseous just saying why at this point. But that's okay, because actually so. The point is, this is so new that the last time we recorded an episode it wasn't really actually a thing yet. And then the last two weeks. It's just exploded, so let's get on with the thing and then we'll come. Come to that when we come to it, kind of thing. Yep, and of course my hair is now right, okay so let's dive in with the first one.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, I know, you cut your hair very, very good, very short and short and sweet, just like you. No, you're not short, but you're sweet. Okay, so you want to kick off at the beginning? We have Power Apps. You saw something from Andrew Patinko?

Nick:

Yes, good friend, andrew Patinko, about embedding PCF controls into the sitemap, which it's interesting because I think he kind of took something he saw and then kind of ran with it a little bit. And what's really cool is we all know, for creating this is going in the context of creating model-driven power apps and there's the whole. We can do the site, we can point it to custom pages, we can point it to Dataverse tables. But he's taken it a step further where he wanted to embed an actual PCF control and of course, we can do navigation links as well. I do that a lot when I'm building model-driven apps.

Nick:

If you need to navigate outside, the model-driven app is somewhere else. So he's taken that navigation link and he wanted to point that to an embedded PCF and he was. You know. Of course he has that URL parameter. He got the hello world, but then talk more about passing additional parameters using the Xtrem Navigate 2. It's really an interesting process here in terms of how it's being supported and stuff. I think he might have addressed this, but basically it's kind of like instead of building not instead of, but very much like building custom pages. You'll be able to navigate directly to a PCF control into your model-driven app directly from the site map and directly get to it. Of course, when you and I finally ramp ourselves up on PCF controls, like we said we were going to since last December and maybe we'll, maybe we'll vibe code that too, but again, I'll try not to.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, why not? I mean, come on, I'm not going to learn React at this point. There's no point. So, yeah, I'm just going to. If I'm going to do it, it's going to have to be a vibe coding, yeah, yeah, so we'll put that link in the show notes.

Nick:

So if you're building PCF controls and you want another way for your users to access this, check out that post by Andrew. He is a very smart guy, really great guy, too and check out his other content as well. He's one of the probably one of the top developers that I know in the power platform space. So thanks, andrew for posting that.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, very much. And also I saw something from Scott Martin today on LinkedIn which he alerts everyone that rich text fields is now deprecated and you have to use the modern controls instead. So if you have rich text field components on your model open app and you're using it, then you have to remove it. I think it was April 18th or something. It's pretty crazy, so it's around these days. So just make sure to check your existing solutions for that and replace it with a new one.

Nick:

Yeah, I think it had to do with security, so that's why there was the big rush on it. And it's interesting because this isn't the first time Microsoft has swapped out the rich text editor. It used to be based on something called TinyMCE a few years ago. Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but I think that's what it was, and I think that was more due to a licensing issue. So hopefully this will be the last time we have to worry about rich text controls, but who knows, it's always an exciting and bumpy ride.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, but also, scott, he points his finger at something which is also important. So, for instance, some of us are using this for data being pulled dynamically into PowerPages, but the junk tag are ruining that functionality. And he's quoting the documentation saying you can customize the editor's experience, features and behavior. The control's modern text experience is shown in the following screenshot. Except you can't anymore. He says so it's too much to expect. That feature partly is achieved prior to deprecation, apparently, and it's. And then he kind of shows the finger and it says the price of co-pilot. Everything else goes to beep. So because and it also brings up something, the event management functionality and outbound marketing and stuff. So I think it's one of those situations where, yes, they're deprecating something somewhere, but then they don't know exactly what that implicates on other systems and maybe there's not really a replacement either. It's good that people put a finger on this and highlight it for sure.

Nick:

Yeah, so before we leave the PowerApp, something fun from our friend.

Ulrikke:

Anna.

Nick:

Black and we dove into some serious stuff right away, but I think she did something really cool. Now I do realize we're now well into April and April Fool's Day is past, but still I think this is a really cool post of what she did. Let me see if I had it here. Here we go About how she had a lot of the naming conventions and things that we do, but she did kind of a really cool April Fool's post. Like very much sarcasm and just I'm going to pull up like read for that. We'll put the link but read it for yourself.

Nick:

But like talk about classic workflow, the old school automation. That's definitely being deprecated next month or the month after that, or maybe never. Honestly, at this point it's less of a feature and more of a legend whispered among better devs. It's true, I still use classic workflows, still running strong and prod, still feared at dev. It's true it's like but it's kind of a tug of cheek, but of course there's a lot of honesty in this. She talks about, of course, auditing business rules. We'll talk about business rules in a bit, maybe Copilot, custom connector, data, duplicate detection. Oh yeah, dataverse. It sounds like a Marvel spinoff, so it is.

Ulrikke:

You have the multiverse and you have the Dataverse.

Nick:

Exactly. Oh yeah, solution layers. It's like lasagna, but if you mess up the order, the genes ends up in dev and the sauce is crying in pride. So true.

Ulrikke:

So funny. Yeah, very good. Thank you, anna. I actually proposed using old school workflows for something the other day. I can't remember what use case it was. And then the young dev went what the what now? So we're in Power. I can't find it in Power Automate. I'm like no, no, no, no, you're a summer child, let me show you the old interface. And then he went what?

Nick:

Yes, old interface, but it does cool things. So for all you kids out there, if you want to get some synchronous workflows going, remember classic workflows.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, and then I'm like I'm showing them in the solution they go. So why is it under processes? I'm like don't ask too many questions, Just point and click and laugh and smile. Okay, Yep.

Nick:

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep.

Ulrikke:

Yep, yep, yep, yep. All right, moving on to something a lot more fun. Next on the list is Power Pages Dark Mode by Colm Harrison, and I love to see posts about Power Pages and styling and branding. It makes me all goofy and happy and chibi, because he has a few blog posts about. So this one is about how you can enable dark mode for PowerPages. He has a little script on the page where it allows the user to toggle between dark mode and light mode, and it starts the post by saying how I think it was. 70% of users on mobile devices have dark mode as their default, so this is kind of how you can help PowerPages adhere to some of that for your users. And also he has another blog post of how to use the bootstrap styling engine so you can actually have it look a little more up to date maybe than the default bootstrap blue and yeah.

Nick:

So good job, colm, colm, and keep it up, and I'll make sure to share whatever nice posts you make over our power pages styling yeah, awesome, looks very cool and like I love posts where I see blocks of code, that's great and just cut and paste the code and go with it so interesting.

Nick:

It kind of ironic, because the next one you're talking about a pcf component, uploading blobs, and you and I were just fighting with the file upload pre, like actually right before recording this podcast, because it's you were trying to set this up and I'm like, yeah, just follow the documentation, it should work. And then I went through to follow the documentation and we're running to a few little weird blockers. So we're we're currently in a state of did something change or did we miss something? I think something, something's changed, but anyways, let's talk about this PCF component that you stumbled across.

Ulrikke:

Because this is ironic. I put this link in here like two weeks ago, just immediately after we recorded the last one, and then I've been working with the Azure guy to get this up and running so that you can upload images from a basic form in Power Pages and have it upload to Azure Blob Storage. Of course the scenario is expenses and receipts, right and so, and then preparing to record this with you, I'm like going through a list and I go wait, there's a PCF for that. Because another PCF, I should say. So someone created a new PCF component that upload file directly to Azure Blob Storage. It supports files up to 10 gigabytes. It's built on the PowerPages file API secure, standard-based can do. With PowerPages you have much more granular controls of what external services you want to interact with and also what kind of course you will allow for those services, both on PowerPages and in the Azure setup. So you can have a pretty narrow kind of straw between the two. So I guess this is fully supported.

Ulrikke:

I can't see any reasons why not, and it's a custom experience that you can set up if you don't think that the out of the box thing is good enough. So of course I'll put a link to it in the show notes and it's in the PCF gallery. You can go in and download it. And, of course, if you ever go in and download and use one of these components in your own solution, if you ever go in and download and use one of these components in your own solution, you are responsible for checking the code, making sure that it adheres to your security standards. No code, as with everything else, if it's created by an AI bot or it's by coded, or if on Stack Overflow, whatever it is If you put something in your production environment, you are responsible for it. So make sure that you double check with your security people if this is good enough for your use case. But yeah, keep the PCF coming people.

Nick:

It's all good. It was Richard Wilson that posted that. I'm not sure if he mentioned his name yet, but he's got the GitHub link in the PCF gallery and we'll repost that as well.

Ulrikke:

So that's all good and well, and I see that the next few here are on me, so let me just, let's just dive into this now.

Nick:

Do you want to talk about the ALM stuff first and then we can dive into all the other stuff?

Ulrikke:

Because now I put that link in there, but I don't know what this is. So this you can, maybe you can tell me, Okay, so let me tell you. I put a link, so I put don't laugh at me.

Nick:

This is how yep, this is how we come, this is how we work, this is how we roll. Well, that looks interesting. Let's just paste that in let's future Nick. You know if I can figure that out.

Ulrikke:

And I saw this video on Instagram the other day. A guy put up a camera and it's facing him sitting on the sofa with a TV and a ball of food, and he's like and the tagline is what it's like to live with someone with ADHD and a non-neurotypical person. That's what it was. So he's sitting there enjoying his meal, right, and then his girlfriend comes in and then she says so you know the thing with the, you know, so the weekend, the dog, cause the cage in the car, cause of the cabin, and you see the guy go, and then she looks at him and she goes what? And then she walks away and he's like okay, just resume eating, just pretend like it didn't happen.

Ulrikke:

She comes rushing in again, sits down next to him and then he's looking at her and she goes what, why don't you turn on the start to show? And he's like well, I thought we were planning the weekend with the car, the dog. And she's like no, no, we're eating watching a show. Come on, put play. He's like okay, I'll push play. And then she gets up and she walks out again and he's like and then she comes back and she goes because the car won't work, because my mom on the weekend. He's like so now we're planning the trip, and then he starts laughing and then she sees the camera and she just punches and sometimes I feel like, okay, so that's what it's like to be you. I'm like that's awesome. All the time it's like I'll just come in there just random, just hit you with a million different starts of sentences and you're left being like am I supposed to make sense of all of this?

Nick:

But somehow you do All too well. We could probably talk for about two hours on this, but that's not the type of podcast we do.

Ulrikke:

I know we're probably going to cut it out, but I just need to find the link to that instagram polls now share it with you because it's so much fun. I think you know people are going to relate to it, okay, so sorry. Digress done, let's dive into the sorry go ahead no, okay.

Ulrikke:

So people listening in every week now knows as well enough to to kind. This is okay. Okay, using map files in ALM by Benedict Bergman. It has to do with a dataverse and part platform in ALM and then I don't. I just I don't know what it is. So can you tell me what this is all about? Sometimes I'll, because I know, because I've run into it, I ran into it so many times. I have something. I'll download something and then it has a map. There's this map, something, something missing. I think that this has to do with that. Do you get what this is? Using map file in ALM.

Nick:

It's funny because I saw this, this post I thought, ooh, this looks cool. I copied the link, I went to OneNote and then I saw that you already pasted it, so like, okay, cool, but yeah. So basically, with the map files, it's. Let's just say this yes, we know map files are a thing in ALM. Basically, what Benedict has done is he's written a very good blog post to go through the entire process and explain it about how you know to upload binaries like web resources and plugins correctly into your source control using a map file as part of your ALM process. So, as opposed to me badly butchering it and I'm sorry, benedict for doing that please read his post and it will help explain this whole process. If it is something you're working on, setting up your ALM, you're working on creating a pro code, plugins and web resources and how to get those properly into DevOps.

Ulrikke:

All right, okay, let's leave it at that. Perfect. And also, I saw you know it is something that we have talked about ALM for a while, and then it put up a new resource. I'm sure it's something that someone needed, as we're highlighting it, but we don't fully understand what it is about. But it's that doesn't matter, it's no problem. All right, let's move on to something that I still.

Ulrikke:

On the same kind of note, I don't really do a lot of automated testing and automated testing in Power Platform as something I've seen and gotten excited about so many times, but I still haven't had the time to wrap my head around it, and that's also because it's not really. It's, of course, something that I need to be aware of. But also on the teams that I'm working on currently, we have people that have dedicated roles that do this for us in the project. So that means back in the day it used to be Power Platform, developers kind of had to know everything about everything, but right now it's more role-based and it's more nuanced than that. So the PowerCat team put together a resource about automated testing. So if you're into that and that you're kind of in that role, then check that out, because there's a kit.

Ulrikke:

There's an automated testing kit that you can deploy to your environment which allows you to set up automated testing for Power Platform and is really powerful, absolutely so powerful. And with the advent of web coding and AI driven development, it is not. It is more less than as common to understand what the code does. As long as it works, we're happy. So having an automated testing setup to make sure that the new things you introduce to your environment doesn't break other things, for instance, is very important. So please have a look at that and, yeah, happy coding.

Nick:

Yeah, no, there's a lot of great tools but again, like I think with anything and this is, this is great that there's another resource the thing is with testing is it doesn't happen as often in terms of automated testing, because I think there's a lot of resources and effort to set it up. So it's a case this is almost a prime example of we're too busy cutting down trees to sharpen the saw or find a more efficient process, because we get into very much. I think we get into projects where we're very results driven and the result is get the code working and it's I hate to say it, but it's almost test and prod, and I've seen that happen in the past where let's get it working, we do some rudimentary testing, everything works, and then let's deploy it and sort of see what happens. This, you know, the idea of automated testing is to provide a much more rigorous process so it can go through and you know, without having a user having to go through all of these steps to retest something, when we add a new feature or we add new capabilities or we fix a bug, that that bug fix doesn't break other things. It's sort of like.

Nick:

Then it becomes tedious, it's sort of again. You're doing the same thing more than once. Now maybe it's time to automate it. And this is where a lot of these test kits and things like Playwright for automated testing and a bunch of other tools are really would help out. And again, there's these toolkits like. What the Powercat team is providing is helping reduce that length of time to set up the testing process, to make it, I would say, economical to introduce into a project and make it just a fact of life. I don't think in a lot of the Power Platform projects I've been involved with, they're not quite mature to the point where and the tools of course, weren't mature as well. It's sort of like, wow, that seems like a lot of work to you know what's our payoff on this? And it definitely. There is the huge payoff, but it does take a bit to get there.

Ulrikke:

So thanks for the part yeah, but you look at the time yeah, absolutely. But you look at the time for a current project that we're on that we're now spending creating checklists. Every time we deploy to production, we want to make sure that we've run our tests. So we're putting that together. Imagine we make this set up in a test environment and for our tester or QA person to have access to it. So every time we run to production, every time we have a release, he just runs this automatically.

Ulrikke:

And now my next question is, then, because our biggest challenge has always been test data. So does this automated testing then include saturation of data and making sure that your test data is reset? Does it have solutions and packages for that as well? Because that is kind of the big Achilles heel when it comes to testing, in my view, in my experience, is that we never have enough and good enough quality of test data to test on, and that's why, like I said, it's testing in production. Yes, the integration works. Yes, we know that the key is right and, yes, we know that this automation is set up correctly. Now the test data is kind of where the crux is. So, yeah, I think this is something I would really look into if I was in a position as a tester for one of our projects at least.

Nick:

That's a great point because you're absolutely right. That's always been the issue. It's like, yes, we set up a test environment, yes, we can do solutions, deploy super nicely all the code, mapping files, the whole bit. We can deploy that to our downstream environments. But then of course, the data gets old. All of a sudden we've created a bunch of new test records how many, like you know confession time? How many people in their test systems have Homer Simpson and Bart Simpson as contacts in their test data, with a whole bunch of, like donations or memberships or renewals or, you know, grant applications and all of a sudden you start having this test data and it becomes very messy very fast.

Nick:

I've worked a little bit in some of my training environments where I've set up power automate flows that will go through and clear out all the test data and reset it. But that also takes a long time to set up, living in and what I love one of the things I use ChatGPT for or you can do this in Copilot as well is to generate test data. Give me 100 records following this pattern using these fields, and it will generate for me, like you know, an actual file that I can upload into Dataverse. That's really cool, but then that still is how do we clear out the old data and how do we automate all of that? So, yeah, I don't know if this particular framework has that, but again, this is, you know, I think, in terms of test data, that's something that I believe this is where AI can really get the tedium out of it is by generating that test data, and because that to me is, you're absolutely right, one of the biggest challenges in terms of automated testing.

Ulrikke:

Well, you look at something like planDesigner and you would think that it would be able to kind of create that for you.

Ulrikke:

So once we have the ERD diagram and we have the data model set up and it understands the whole setup that we have in Dataverse, how about being able to go in through PlanDesigner and say, hey, produce test data.

Ulrikke:

Because we have situations in Dev and some of our customers where you know that something's going to fail in dev because the data isn't correct. The hierarchy between something changed and the core data is not updated yet. So you know you expect that flow to fail and then you kind of have to rely on the fact that you know that it's going to work in UIT and test and you have to test it there before you move it on because something's not fully baked or there's a discrepancy between the environments. So I think this is kind of where best practices and the real world collides or separates, because yes, we know it's not best practice, but in the heat of the moment when you're running a real project, sometimes these are the things that come up in the real world. That isn't best practices and isn't documented anywhere. And also just wanted to sorry.

Nick:

No, I was talking about test data. The whole other avenue to this, too, is, of course, anonymizing that test data Like, yes, you can harvest data from your production to bring into your dev and test for testing and development, but all of a sudden, if you're using real world names and things like that, there becomes compliance issues, gdpr issues, that type of thing. So, yeah, there are tools out there that will anonymize all that, but that's another wrinkle in the ointment of this test data and why we have the Homer Simpsons and Captain Americas and everybody sitting in our test data as well.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I totally get that. And also, I mean I think it was Matthias Tolgaard-Bern which had a blog post a few years back on how he's using ADO, so Azure DevOps, to deploy test data to his environments. So I mean that's another approach, right? You have the data set already ready to go and you just deploy it with Azure DevOps pipelines. So there is a myriad of different approaches and, of course, someone listening thinking you know what actually I do this and this works so well in my project. Let us know, because this is something that we're really into and very curious about. So how do you use automated testing in your platform environments? Do you use AI? How do you anonymize? I would love to see more content around this coming out, and also comments in the in the comment section below, where you saw this post, because this is really top of mind for us. So we would love to see more content around this.

Nick:

Yes, for sure.

Ulrikke:

And moving on, while talking about Copilot and AI and stuff, you want to dive into the vibe coding one.

Nick:

Yeah, because this is the thing that we were going to talk about it being a new thing, it being a bunch of different things. So, of course, I started seeing on YouTube and a few other talks and even some of the I've. I started seeing on YouTube and a few other talks and even some some of the Microsoft announcements. They started talking about this concept of vibe coding and like hey, what, what really is this? And then there was even a link that it came off pretty early after our last episode by hired guntech is. The name of the gentleman is, um, ah, chris Harper, and he was in Bermuda actually, and I lived in Bermuda a little bit over 20 years ago, so I'm not sure if we ever crossed paths or not, I'm not sure how long he was there, and he has a lot of interesting other posts on the Power Platform. So it's kind of good to stumble. I like stumbling across content of people that I've not crossed paths with before, so sometimes you get some surprises. So check out Chris's blog post. He's got a lot of good ones there and he's talking about extending PowerPlot from using Vibe coding and I'm like, okay, what's more of this whole Vibe coding? And he's talking about using Python. Python is one of these languages that have always been sort of outside of my radar, but now it's in our face, without giving away too many state secrets. At MVP Summit it was kind of, I think, heavily hinted that learning Python would be actually a good thing, especially for us working in the Power Platform. So I don't think that's too much of a secret, based on the content coming back.

Nick:

But Chris explained a little bit about what vibe coding is, about it not being a formal methodology or framework. He gave some other examples, some YouTube videos, and this is the rabbit hole that I think you and I sometimes fall down right. So basically, the idea is and this is again how I'm interpreting it is you're using AI tools to generate code. That's not really new. We've been doing GitHub Copilot. We have the Copilots built into PowerPages and some other things where we could say you know, write me some JavaScript to you know, highlight this line in a list in a PowerPages or even GitHub Copilot. We saw that we talked about before the example at Power Platform Conference a year or two years ago about how he created the Nokia snake game just by interacting with Copilot. The whole idea of vibe coding is, from how I interpret, is taking it to the next level, where you don't need to even be a coder, you don't need to necessarily know what you're doing in terms of the code itself. You still need to know what exactly your inputs, your outputs are.

Nick:

And then there was actually a YouTube video of someone creating forget the guy's name, but it was Matthew Berman, who I think is well known on YouTube. He went through and created Tetris using a voice command and basically back and forth, and every time the compiler came back with an error or something went wrong, the screen rendered a little bit wrong. He went back and basically described the error, even cut and paste the error back into the AI and went through the process of fixing it, even to the point where he told the AI to create an AI to play the game of Tetris. It did a horrible. It didn't do well playing Tetris, but you get the idea. And so it still wasn't perfect, there were still a lot of things, but we're getting to the point where AI is almost, I'd say, a new interface for creating software applications.

Nick:

I actually ran into this last week. In a sense. What happened was and I have actually I did a video and I did a blog post and kind of so for those of you who read and watched that, you can fast forward a bit because I'm just going to repeat the story. But I was working with some colleagues and they were trying to look at some existing business rules. They needed to extend it, basically to hide and showed some fields in a model-driven app, but it was actually based on related data. So we're looking at, yeah, business rules weren't going to cut it. It was a little bit too complicated. And for those of you who've done business rules before, you've seen that old interface I think it was one of Anna Black's things in one of her cards or her April Fool's joke. Business rules has been around for probably 10, over 10 years in CRM before. It's meant to be a way that a business user or a functional consultant can actually build some logic within a model-driven app. It works well for what it does, but it really you run into blockers and you run into roadblocks very quickly.

Nick:

So then the next step is okay, we need to write JavaScript code, client-side JavaScript code and model-driven apps that we've been doing in CRM since the dawn of time. But then we get into okay, javascript, that's a pro code. We want to do a low code, no code approach first. So that's why I've seen in a lot of projects they'll try to do as much as they can in business rules and then when they get stuck, then they move on to JavaScript. The problem is JavaScript and business rules don't play well nice, because especially if you're manipulating fields, but that's a whole other segue. So basically we were sort of talking. I said, yeah, we're going to need to use JavaScript for this, and the team was like, okay, we want to get more ramped up onto this. So this is something we'll take on. And I said, no problem, I'll write up the. I'll write up what you need to do, kind of break it down how you should. You know kind of the business logic, just to make sure we're all in agreement.

Nick:

I started writing it out and just kind of pulling the schema names and the field names and I'm like to put into our Azure DevOps as a task and I'm like wait a minute, I'm going to write this as a prompt. And then I wrote it as your Power Platform developer, you need to hide and show these fields based on the data that's in this related table that's named. This based on the field that's related to this. Put it in a chat. Gpt chunked around, boom, here's the JavaScript with nicely named variable names. Here every line was completely documented. Then it gave me a whole section of here's how your code works, and then another section here's how you upload the web resource into your model driven app and activate the function. Everything like that. I do this every day, but that literally would have taken me a couple hours in terms of testing and back and forth. That's generated in a matter of minutes.

Nick:

That means I think anybody that can follow instructions or knows logic without knowing JavaScript necessarily could go through that process and that code work right away. Very simple example. If I was something a lot more complex, there'd probably need to be a little bit more iteration. I might actually need to dive in and fix the code a little bit, but this to me was like wait a minute, this is vibe coding. And if we now have this vibe coding, why would anybody use business rules ever again? Because this way a regular functional consultant can actually go in, describe the need, have it, generate the code without them necessarily needing to know the code. And I know this puts a lot of people on edge, and rightly so, but then you're going to copy and paste and put that in to your model driven app and away you go.

Nick:

So that kind of got me thinking why do we even need Power Platform? Why do we even need to build apps? Why can't I get to a point where I can just go to an AI tool and say build me an app, build me a website, and it will generate that all for me? Now the nice thing is, with Dataverse and the Power Platform, we have built-in security, we have governance, we have things like caching. We have all of these mechanisms that Microsoft has spent big teams and big number of years building, so let's continue to utilize that.

Nick:

But in terms of the low code, yes, I still think we're going to build Canvas apps, but I think already, if I go into even Power Apps, the main tool to create tables right away Copilot's in my face. So we're getting to the point where AI is beginning to do a lot for us, and how much do we really need to know? To the point where AI is beginning to do a lot for us and how much do we really need to know, and that, I think for some is scary, but I think it also opens up a lot of opportunities for people that have the logical skills to build very powerful business applications without having to know necessarily all the tools. So for me, the vibe coding and AI is yet just a. You can call it whatever you want, but basically it's a new tool to create code. So I've talked for way too long. What's your thoughts and opinion on this?

Ulrikke:

Yeah. So let me just backtrack a little bit and talk about the difference between AI-driven development and vibe coding. So vibe coding is where you have no idea about custom rules or business rules or anything. You just have a need and you just ask the co-pilot. You know, help me out. So the fact that you can write the prompt and you know the column names, you know the setup, you know what you want, you can describe it as a developer talking to a junior dev. It's not vibe coding.

Ulrikke:

In my world, Trying to get Chatty Petit to kind of distinct between the two, vibe coding is more about I have no idea what I'm doing. I don't care about the code, I just want to make something and you just have a conversation with a bot and then it creates something you need and then off you go. The fact that you can actually see the code and work with the code and implement it, it's not exactly vibe coding. It's like you said. It's something we've been bit of a different thing, but also it's. It's also kind of putting an emphasis on where we're going and I absolutely agree with you. I think low code as a thing and I think kind of Canvas app is the first thing to go. I mean, you see how far you can get with something using just Azure Copilot and then sorry, GitHub Copilot and just deploying it to an Azure resource. I've had a few geeking out sessions with a friend of mine and, yeah, he's shown me how easy it is, because I'm not a pro coder so I really don't know where to start. And just to see how far he can get with just sitting down with a bot and just creating whatever, None of us looked at the code and suddenly we had a game we could play. It's kind of crazy, but also it's different when you know the requirements. So just wanted to kind of backtrack and put those two different things into perspective. But yeah, I fully agree.

Ulrikke:

I think, if anything, like you said, Power Platform has a place in this, because I still don't see that these AI services are good enough thinking about security. I don't think they're good enough in terms of accessibility. I don't think they're good enough in terms of enabling other developers to kind of edit it right. So I've seen a lot of use cases where someone's very happy about something and then they go in trying to fix one little thing a week later and then suddenly rewrites from the beginning or just mucks it all up or so. The the kind of maintenance of it is a bit fuzzy to me and I think also the co-pilot experiences we have in the designers are going to completely disappear because they don't really add any value anyways. Um, so I don't know. I I love the idea and I am so. Just from last week until this week I've used CoPilot and sorry ChatDVT a lot more and I'm kind of embracing this more now than I used to.

Ulrikke:

I think I've been on the fence a little bit, but just having those geek out sessions and conversations with other people in the community that are kind of leading the way a little bit has opened my eyes to see that no, this is not something we're going to stop and this is just a natural evolution of everything. And we've been here before. It was with the printing profession, it was with the graphical design going digital right. So there's so many tools and so many jobs that have disappeared over the years with this kind of evolution. This is just another one of those have disappeared over the years with this kind of evolution. This is just another one of those. And yeah, it's going to take people's jobs away, but they're going to create a myriad of other jobs, so I'm not really worried and I'm more optimistic now that I've been forever about this what gets me?

Nick:

and you're, I'm going to the same way, cause you know me, I was kind of like it's not that I didn't get it, I get it, but it doesn't excite me as much, because I love going into code, I love to debug the little things and that kind of and all of that and and and I know, and so I just want to make it publicly clear that the sticks shift analogy that I used in my blog post and my video came from because we had talked this offline and you said, well, it's like driving stick, like you know, and it reminded me yeah, I love driving stick shift.

Nick:

It was so much fun. I haven't done it in a couple years now and you can't even it's really hard to even buy a car with a stick shift these days but it's just something that's just sort of evolved, and then we kind of move on. So, in terms of the what is vibe coding and not vibe coding, there's no, I don't think there's no official definition either. It's just one of these terms and you know what, in three weeks, that term could be dead, it could be called something else, or or merged or whatever else.

Nick:

And I kind of get like, yeah, because some you know it was even one of the blog posts they said oh, the vibe purists say you shouldn't know code at all or shouldn't even look at it, and I can't help but look at the code or anything I build, like what's behind it. So maybe I wasn't really doing vibe coding in terms of you know the internet definition, when that's fair. But the other thing that opens up my eyes is looking at even there was something last week in terms of OK, we're looking at something else. It was developed in a certain platform. How could we build something similar? And I'm kind of like OK, well, I don't know that particular platform. Is it worth my time to learn this other technology, this other platform? Time to learn this other technology, this other platform? And then part of my mind is going well, nick, you don't need to just install it and get AI to help you out. Get AI to the point where you're at least building a minimal, viable product, and then by that point you should, it should have taught you enough, you should have seen enough that you can kind of take it to the next level. So this is now exciting me again because it's opening doors to things that I always wanted to learn but realized it's going to take a lot of extra effort.

Nick:

Pcf controls is a good example. It is something that's always been on my list. We talked about it, but who's to say, let me sit down with VS Code, visual Studio Code, and let me just start working with ChimeGPT and let me see if I could put a PCF together. I don't necessarily need to understand all the nuances, but probably, when it gets put together, it'll probably be very natural to me, because I've been working with the Power Platform, I've written plugins, I've written JavaScript. So this is. I think you're right. It's not. We're not losing jobs. We're opening the doors for many, for a lot of new things. You just have to have to open up your mind and I would say and it's kind of showing me the opportunities that exist so, as much as we shit on AI over, we're coming through.

Ulrikke:

No, no. I want to say just to be clear I am shitting on the co-pilot experience inside the PowerPages designer, because that's shit. I hate the Power Automate co-pilot. It's fucking shit Because it ruins my whole thing. I ask it for one expression, one Power Fx expression, and it takes upon itself to ruins my whole thing. I ask it for one expression, one PC power effects expression, and it takes upon itself to rewrite my whole flow. It takes me hours because. Can it go back? No, can I say please go back to the last version? No, it can't, because then it locked everything up. I'm not touching that thing because it takes me forever to clean it up. I absolutely so no, that I hate on. This is next level, this is something else.

Ulrikke:

And then I wanted to kind of move us along a little bit, because last episode we talked about I talked about a news item that I didn't fully understand again, which had to do with MCPs model context protocols. I did not understand the ramifications of that at all. And then this week I saw a post from Sandy Peng on LinkedIn explaining what exactly is PCP Model Context Protocol, and she says it's the bridge between AI and everything else. It's like a USB-C for AI no integration hell, no security nightmares and no infrastructure headaches. It is how you connect AI to everything else. And then I suddenly okay, so that I understand.

Ulrikke:

So that blog post alone just kind of opened my mind and kind of shifted gears a little bit. If you can then have that with Power Platform, then suddenly you can talk to Dataverse in a different way, or it doesn't matter, you can have your app be whatever you want it to be and you can can plug it in to whatever service you want it to be. Kind of it shifts the gears a little bit. And then from that perspective I'm thinking, okay, because part platform in a sense is a big AI hub. Its connectivity is kind of the backbone of it. I'm like, okay, so let's see where this is going. So I'm just putting tabs on that at the moment and also just trying to make sure, because now we're on, the timekeeper has been sleeping. I see you have a blog post from Mark Christie you wanted to talk about.

Nick:

We can. We can probably recircle that. Again. That was actually going back more to embracing AI with Microsoft Co-Pilot, but talking about the different levels of AI transfer, transformation, about using, and again this kind of covers off a lot of other content. But Mark does a good job at breaking it down. The four levels Human first, you know we talk to AI and then we're using humans with agents, and then agents with humans, and then agent first and human oversight. So going through these iterations, I don't think agents is a whole other concept that's evolving very quickly from a lot of different companies. We're seeing a lot of content now about people building agents and what it is is, you know. So about going out creating agents to kind of do personal whether it's personal productivity or greater productivity and Mark does a good job of kind of breaking down what these different levels are and where companies are at and where it's going. So, again, without kind of diving too deep into that or causing another big discussion, he talks about the different levels. So check out that post. It's a really good read. Thanks, mark, for doing that content. I really appreciate it.

Nick:

I think it's good to continue this conversation as we all get our heads wrapped around this and I think this is the thing that I keep hearing from different people. It's sort of like we're all in this, we're all learning. There are no. This is part of one of these things where, if you're coming into the Power Platform, there's people like you and I that have been doing Power Apps for years. We've been doing Flows for years, we've been doing Power Pages for years. This stuff we're all starting out kind of at the same pace. In a couple of years, when new folks come in, they'll adapt to this. But this is so this type of content I really like. It really shows that we're all in this together, we're all learning, we're all sharing. There is a ton of info, but it's changing faster than I've ever seen something change before.

Ulrikke:

And I've seen some of the most. Some of the frustrations that I see coming through. I think most often is when to use what. What tool is right for this? When to use and as architects, that's the majority of our job is right tool for right job. We talk so much about this, but then this week and we've talked about this as well with Microsoft often what you'll find is the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, and that's something you told me today and it's so accurate, and so let me just share something that I discovered this week.

Ulrikke:

So I have a customer that has a need to have their customers self-service access to APM endpoints so APM being Azure API management and so I was diving into Azure talking to one of my colleagues just trying to see what APM is like today, because it's been a while since I looked at it, and what do you know? Apm developer portals show up, which is now a portal experience that you can set up in Azure that talks directly to APIM and allows your customers to interact and to log into that and to handle, manage their own API keys, and also you can monetize it and put strategies on top of it. It's massive and it's pretty new and I go into the documentation and I'm like ah, portal, interesting, wonder what that looks like. It's built on Bootstrap and then there's a designer and you can set up fonts and styles and pages so you can use authentication.

Ulrikke:

You can have Azure B2C or any OAuth or OpenID Connect. Then you have deployments so you can do that, and then you can have header and content and footer and page layouts and stuff. And I'm like whoa, wait a minute, this is way too familiar. So I'm looking into this and it's exactly like Power Pages and I'm thinking, okay, surely there is a host, your own host, with WordPress Extend. There's a third party business that has made a product around this, and I thought surely there's a Power Pages, something, something here, somewhere. No, there's not.

Ulrikke:

And so Microsoft is now, within the Azure team, created a designer for a portal and they have no idea that PowerPages even exists. Probably A very good example of exactly what you said, like the left and the right hand doesn't know what they're doing. And I think this goes back to the overall conversation about AI or any product or any service what to use when. What tool is right for the thing. Well, actually, the tool closest to you and this has been the way of developers for a while, the thing that you're most familiar with the tool that is closest to you is the right one.

Nick:

All right. So that, yeah, interesting about that whole portal experience because it's, yeah, it looked and smelled like PowerPages but it wasn't, and yeah, so we'll put the link there, check it out. Like I said, it's not. Like I said, it's not connected to Dataverse. So there's your, that's what PowerPages will do for you. But in terms of the experiences, you're right. I saw you showed it to me.

Ulrikke:

I'm like this looks in Azure to know my way around it, and so this is something that I discovered just by knowing a little bit and just pulling that thread a little bit Now I learned some more, yeah. So yeah, absolutely Check that out. We have other things to cover. We're running out of time. We're going to cover a few more things before we leave, you guys.

Nick:

And the right hand not knowing what the right, the left hand is doing. To be fair, microsoft is now move, is now 50 years old. So it's, you know, in terms of memory, understanding all of that stuff. But no, it was this, it was actually.

Nick:

You probably saw a lot of posts and things like that about microsoft being 50 years old. Congratulations to any organ, any business that can last that long, have such a cultural impact. It basically, if there was no microsoft, they're probably this podcast would be radically different. Um, our paths might have not even crossed, which is a scary thought, um, but overall, uh, yeah. And then you know, having worked there as well for for two of those 50 years, uh, it's really, um, it's a, it's, you know, despite all its, despite its dumping co-pilots and making shitty software in certain places, overall it, you know, in the grand scheme of things, great job, microsoft. Congratulations to the staff, the leadership, the shareholders, everybody involved, of course, all the community that talks about this stuff. Definitely something, a huge milestone to celebrate, and we should all be very humbled and honored to be a part of it, and proud as well, yeah.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, we are. Especially these days, you really see the value of having a big company with that kind of history pushing AI and these things forward. We would not be here if it weren't for Microsoft. Sure, we have open AI, but, you know, having such an established company in the world pushing software and digital transformation like Microsoft S it's just, it wouldn't have happened without that, I think. So, yeah, absolutely great. And another news a good friend of us, rory Neary. He launched his own podcast last week or the week before Power Platform, this and that it's called. He released his pilot episode and he has a few other episodes coming out with someone you might know, so it's very exciting to see. It's another one of those power platform interview style podcasts, but he has a very interesting format.

Nick:

Check out Rory's new podcast and make sure to listen and subscribe so that you don't miss an episode yeah, and congrats Rory, because that's sometimes just getting out that first episode is the hardest part and and then after that it's easy, right, eureka? Like, just get together every two weeks chat record and not really. It's a lot of work and, rory, if you need our help at all, you know where to find us. We're more than happy to support you and for all our current listeners. Check out Rory's podcast and we look forward to your. We're up your episode 56.

Ulrikke:

It's and we're just vibing it and it's on autopilot.

Ulrikke:

Oh, it's vibing along. It's half true, ok, so let me just do some advertising before I close up. So my workshop at ColorCloud is on April 24th. I'm going to do a bit of the social media pushing this week and it's about to sell out. So if you want to come to my workshop on Power Pages from Creation to Go, you have to get your ticket now. Don't wait, because it does sell out and I have a max capacity, so make sure that you sign up for that. And also I have a session with Andy Wingate on BC plus Power Pages as a business central plus Power Pages is true on the conference day, which is on the 25th in Hamburg, so can't wait for that.

Nick:

And then you have yeah, I have DynamicsCon coming up, and then we're that's in. It's in May, that's in Chicago. Then there's Power Summit, which is going to be in London on May 24th. We talked about that last week as well. Dynamics Minds I had a meeting this morning with Matt and George and, yeah, we're dreaming up. Our session is going to be really cool how it's all coming together, just the three of us, like. Even the meeting itself is so much fun, like we just would just and we recorded, so we should just kind of post that as part of it. So, and then beyond that, there's a whole, there's a whole long list of things that I keep saying I need to, I need to cut back. And then I look at that list and I'm kind of, hey, what, I'm not, but we'll, we'll announce those as they come through over the next next few episodes.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, and I think it's ironic that you have one of the sessions that you're doing in the middle of all. Of this is called next session burnout, powerlifting and mental health. So are you going to take your own advice somewhere along here? Because you're doing powerlifting, you're doing the, so you're doing the. You're on track for a new burnout.

Nick:

It's talking about burnout basically I'll come up there and say don't do what I've just been doing you're my dad, do what I say, not what I do. It's like yes, yes.

Ulrikke:

Stop, come on. It's like yeah, no way, mister, I'm going to hold you accountable. You need to, you know, keep on.

Nick:

Alrighty, so next episode is going to be I'd say this is where I always forget to fill in it's going to be April 3rd, wow.

Ulrikke:

It's all going to be over by then, all of the things that I'm working on currently. Now, there's the Easter holiday now between this and the next episode, so that's going to be fun and I can't wait. So, yeah, and with that, let's just vibe on out of here. Vibe on out of here. All right, catch you on the next one.

Nick:

All right, see you later.

Ulrikke:

Bye, okay, see you later.

Nick:

Bye, thank you for listening. If you like 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 host, lurica Akebek, and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.

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