Power Platform Boost Podcast

Build #mvpbuzz (#59)

• Season 1 • Episode 59

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Nick:

Oh, you cracked me up, did you do?

Ulrikke:

this to train your thought. Well, no, I'm trying to stay on the train, but of course, now I'm like anyways, so, but back on the train.

Nick:

But you know, in those days this is how you interact with the computer. You would actually start typing in like load this program, and then of course you had parameters like comma eight meant the disk drive, or I want to. You would type in you know, print, print this thing, like. So you're typing in all of these commands remember all of these commands.

Speaker 3:

Come on, it should be something new. Pushing that out ages ago, what?

Nick:

this is this is how I spent my teenage years is on my computer. So Wow, Let me remember that it got burned in a ROM. But anyways, so then they're going. They're going, oh, co-pilots.

Ulrikke:

Well, you're going to enter into a co-pilot. It's like we're back to props again, like where we were.

Nick:

Welcome everyone to the Power Platform Boost podcast, your weekly source of news and updates from the world of the Power Platform and the Microsoft community, with your host, Nick Doelman, and Ulrikke Akerbk. Hey, Ulrikke.

Speaker 3:

Hey, how are you?

Nick:

I'm good, thanks. I'm here in sunny Slovenia at Dynamics Mines, which is going on right now, and learned already a few good sessions, already a couple of good sessions this morning, and learning lots of stuff. How are you?

Speaker 3:

I'm great, thank you. I'm a bit envious and FOMO-ing out of my mind about you being in Slovenia and before we started recording, you kind of held your phone out the window and showed me the beach and the sun and Croatia and all of that so, and of course also where they're putting up the tents for the parties tonight, and I just want to be there. But I'm here in sunny Norway, windy, sunny Norway, so, but I'm good. I went for a run, I'm feeling good, so everything'm good. I went for a run, I'm feeling good, so everything's good. And I'm going to turn off all social media for the next of the week and go completely dark mode so that I don't get all jealous about all of you guys partying in Slovenia. So already booked planes for next year, just saying, well, plane tickets are already in the bag, because I'm not going to lose out on that conference one more time. I've done me and Katarina Brevold. We made a pact in London this weekend. We were like next year we're going so yeah, because she was going to.

Nick:

there's another conference happening in Dusseldorf this week as well and I spoke to Sari from Finland and see, so she's here for a session today and tomorrow, but then she's going over to Dusseldorf and it's like, oh yeah, she's like I've been off more than she could chew kind of thing on this one. So, yeah, you gotta choose.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, dusseldorf, or Slovene, I don't know that conference is. Oh yeah, dynamics Minds is one of the good ones, for sure.

Nick:

so and speaking of a conference as an event, I mean you and I read an event in london this past saturday. Um was put on his power summit, ai, power summit, ai or whatever it's. Of course, that names evolved over the years. This, of course, is known for his CRM Saturdays back in the day, and then you know Power Community, but basically it was really. It was at the Microsoft offices, a lot of amazing sessions and, of course, he had the whole Lego theme going on. You probably saw that on LinkedIn and everything. So that was and I just also one of those really good, good events, good vibes with everybody, interactions, um, and they've been doing this for 10 years, so good on them. Congratulations, guys, for putting on a really cool, awesome event yeah, very much.

Speaker 3:

April dunham was there. She came all the way over. She had a bit of a euro trip, just like you, a bit of a short version of your euro trip, I think she got, and she squeezed, squeezed it in and it was a very good keynote where she kind of tried to put all of this because, of course, this is on the back of all the news and updates from Build which we are going to cover, and what April was saying is let's try to zoom out a little bit and put this in context, and she watched her own blogs from, or she looked into her own blogs from, back in a day. She also comes from SharePoint and master pages, just like me, as it was kind of fun for me to see her evolution in terms of blogging and content, because it's just exactly like like mine's, it really resonated with me and trying to put it in context of how fast things are moving and also how valuable the content is and, um, and yeah, so, and, and there's a lot of a ai, anxiety, aim, a anxiety, I anxiety, um, going on, uh, so trying to kind of also calm people down a little bit because, yeah, information workers, maybe our job is not going to be looking exactly the way that it looks today, but, um, as developers and as solutionists or as solutionizers, we, we will always have something to do.

Speaker 3:

So that was really good and, of course, yeah, like I said, the whole day, so great we went to. Can we talk about the? Uh, the um, the playwright thing? Yeah, of course, just very briefly, because we were in, because I, I don't, I haven't played around with playwright thing. Yeah, of course, just very briefly, because I haven't played around with playwright at all. And then we were in a session about just that and how it showed the test center and the test suite. Is that right? Was that the two names for the other two things? Because there are kind of three.

Nick:

Three things yeah, very similar. Yeah, I can Very similar.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I can look at my notes, but also I mean that was incredible and to see how you can, because of course it's, it's it's Cody, right, it's scripting, but what you're doing is so from from what I understand is you can hook this up to ADO, to Azure DevOps. You can run it with Azure DevOps pipelines, you can trigger it and then it's going to run through your script in Playwright and hydrate your environment with test data. It's going to run through your test, it's going to log in as someone do something in the UI with dataset and then it turns, it has a result at the end and you can trigger have it trigger multiple test cases in a row, and it was exactly what we need um in in one of our projects as well. So I was just blown away, um, and a bit sad that I haven't played around with play right yet, because I don't think it's that new. So one of those really good sessions where I understood a lot more about a thing that I didn't even know about before.

Nick:

And this goes to I think we've said this before is going to these conferences. A lot of times we kind of gravitate to like, first off, we want to support our friends that are speaking about particular topics um, so there's that aspect to it too. But I also is to go through the agenda and go to places that you might not even be in a current project or anything, and just to learn about these new, new things or things that maybe already existed for. Like I know, a few years ago I went to a session on power bi. I knew nothing about power bi, I didn't have it on any upcoming project, but it was something that, yeah, I needed. I felt I needed to know more about and I know I think both you and I we saw this session independently, because I think you were already in the room and I came in in the room. You're already sitting down watching the session. That was a few minutes late, but I saw it like tools playwright.

Nick:

Yeah, this is something I want to learn more about and this is what's great about these events, because sometimes we just don't take the time to sit down to. Okay, today I'm going to learn about playwright and sit down in front of my computer. Yes, I can do that. Yes, I should do that. I'm sort of like I need to go pick a session to watch here's something, and then you go in and then the presenter. I forget his name. He's from the Netherlands, a really good guy. I've met him before. Let's make sure we get his name in the show notes, but it was probably.

Speaker 3:

I can try, arjan Rijstdijk. I'm sorry, rijstdijk, yeah.

Nick:

Arjan Arjan. So I think he even said he was still relatively new to speaking, but you wouldn't know it because he did such a good session. He was interacting with the crowd and taking questions and they were having a discussion. So, yeah, it's so. This is just one example of where this free community events are so valuable for your own learning journey. And then, of course, this is going to I know this is going to explode into like playwright creating or using, you know, testing agents in our code development, because we're going to get into agents and AI and everything, but again, we still need to know the fundamentals how this stuff works.

Speaker 3:

So, yeah, yeah, absolutely, and it's yeah, and I think also Franco had a post about this last week as well, about how conferences is a good way to immerse yourself in something you know nothing about. So I really subscribe to that. And also, I just wanted to point out something that april said that I also, um, really subscribe to is that if you're not, um, a bit conscious or a bit embarrassed about the code you made or the code you wrote a year ago, then you haven't had any progress. Yes, I've heard that before. I love that. That was kind of the basis of that conference for me. Alright, so we have a deep ton of AI stuff or, sorry, build stuff. It's kind of one and the same To go to Juin.

Nick:

I was about to say. Apparently there was some other big conference last week going on Microsoft. Build. Yeah, exactly right.

Speaker 3:

Yes. So first of all, there's a book of news and we're going to put the link in here. So I'm just making some notes for myself on the side here to put links to the book of news. In the book of news, what you'll find is a very structured overview of, and highlights of, what's most important and you can kind of click through it and it's very good, and you can also download the resources that come with it and also, of course, on the back of the build you have. So first of all, you can sign up and you can see the sessions. A lot of the sessions are recorded and available now for anyone who wants to see them, and also there's a lot of people in the community that does a very good job at summarizing this for us. So did you follow Build closely this year, or?

Nick:

what was it like for you? For my it was more, because I was preoccupied with lifting last week, so that was sort of my main focus, but during, of course, you know, in between, kind of keeping an eye on social media, also preparing for sessions that we did on Saturday plus sessions this week. I really didn't watch live any of the sessions and that kind of thing, but I was looking at social media and then all of a sudden it was like overwhelming. It was like announcement after an announcement and after announcement and I even was just sort of like hold it, how can? I'm on the periphery. There is so much I can't imagine even sitting there in the crowd going through like all of this stuff like a fire hose of new announcements and information, and I'm still trying to get caught up on learning all of these other things.

Nick:

So my experience was for me this is part and parcel of we're living in a time where everything is rapidly changing and it's sort of like, okay, I've settled in, things are changing, this is stuff we need to learn, we need to master, and then all of a sudden it changes and more stuff gets added and it's sort of like, you know, you go to a big restaurant buffet and it's like, oh, this looks like a really good roast beef. And you look over oh wait, there's a ham there. Oh, oh, oh, they have this. And then it's sort of like all of a sudden your plate's overflowing and like how can I you know mentally eat all of this new stuff? But I want to try it, I want to taste it all that, yeah, yeah, that that's how I my experience of build was not just watching from the sideline, sideline yeah, oh, I'm with you.

Speaker 3:

I was exactly the same and I I had great plans to follow along and and to make sure that I got the keynote and everything. I still haven't seen the keynote, but I have seen some of the summary content and so I have a good kind of layover of what was going on, kind of the broader picture. And then I've been diving into the topics that hit me and I think maybe that's a kind of a word of advice to anyone out there that feel like you do and like I do, is that no one can take all of this in, especially when we're moving so fast already and already feel like we're behind, trying to digest everything. Even though AI can have that capability, the human mind doesn't. So find out how you learn the best.

Speaker 3:

What is the way that your mind takes in information? The easiest is it to fiddle with something? Is it through audio video reading, um? Is it the summary blog post? How do you hydrate your head with these news? The most easiest? That's one thing and also get the broader picture of the lay of the land. Scroll through the book of news, for instance, and then just dive into the things you are interested in. That is now important for you in your current job or project. Don't take all of it in. That's not what it's meant for and no one does that. So kind of go easy on yourself a little bit. Talking to the whoever's listening, it's so hard to feel like you have to keep up and kind of get get through everything. But none of us are. And if someone says that they are, yeah, well I think it's better to kind of, yeah, grasp the things that you, that's important to you. Um, so with that, we want to help.

Nick:

Yes. So I would say yeah, for sure. And this is where the community is so good and we're going to you know, I think promote some of that. So this is where people we know in the community and again it's not. This is where we have to take bits and pieces Because, as you said, even the folks that are on top of this that are watching everything they're compiling you said, even the folks that are on top of this that are watching everything they're compiling.

Nick:

So our friends, like Lisa Crosby she did a really good summary video that kind of took a lot of this stuff and digested it down and created a nice little tasting plate of the buffet of information. Also, sebastian, who was actually here at Dynamics Minds I saw him last night. He wrote a really good blog post covering a lot of the same points, but again from a slightly different perspective, but again kind of boiling it down to the highlights, and I found both of those pieces of content really helped me go through a lot of this stuff, plus also looking at some of the other stuff from Microsoft as well. So at first kind of getting overwhelmed with the community with these things.

Speaker 3:

Well, with the community with these things, and also, hopefully, we can help also in this podcast is kind of bringing it down to help you at least get on your journey and have this tasting menu of new news coming through.

Nick:

Yeah and also yeah, sorry, no, no, I was about to say yeah go ahead.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, because also, if you want to go in and look at all the videos from Build, you can look at. So Taki Wai, he posted a good overview of sessions for platform at Build and it's a visual kind of illustration thing that shows you what the different sessions are about and where in the platform they're placed. So that was also a really good visual to get on board on everything. So do you want to go through some of the highlights so that we kind of just point some of these out? Because I also watched Lisa's video and she kind of paints a broader picture of what's going on. So you want to touch on these things a little bit?

Nick:

Yeah for sure. Like I mean, there's so many cool things, but I think one thing, things that, well, maybe I'll just say things that jumped out at me that I can see apply to the own day to day, something like co-pilot tuning. And this is where, yes, we've all gone in a chat GPT, we've all gone on a co-pilot hey, write me a proposal or write me a session or write me an email. But then the nice thing about Microsoft 365 Copilot it goes into all of your own data into your OneDrive and looks at the documents and things like that. That's cool. But now with co-pilot tuning, I can get it to go into my style as a company or my corporate style or my corporate style guides and that kind of thing, and that's really cool because that's where I could really see it help. And that also means you have to have those standards defined a little bit.

Nick:

But again, this is where the human in the loop comes. Tuning was just one of those things that kind of stood out to me as one of those new things from bill that I think is going to help the general, just no matter what industry you're in, if you're a knowledge worker, it's just going to help you create your own internal content. And again, when I go back to, we talked about lazy ai, where we're getting ai to do all that stuff for us. I think more in my experiences over the last few weeks and we talked about this last episode working with these AI tools together in a collaborative sense, it being your thought partner and I've worked on a presentation this week and I use ChatGPT as my thought partner and, of course, if I'm doing corporate stuff, the co-pilot tuning will help again us to generate content more efficiently and more quickly, but, again, good quality because we're involved in the process.

Speaker 3:

Also what I look at tuning as branding for AI. So if you look at, you know using, because chatbots are the UI for AI and this is how you brand it. So when you had a SharePoint internet before, you could always set your branding and you're working with brands and finding a customer's identity. We also always talk about tone of voice when you communicate with someone, is it light and snappy? Is it very business, very corporate, very kind of down to earth? Is it? You know what style? Are you? Very kind of down to earth, is it? You know what style are you, and that shows up in colors, that shows up in fonts, but it also shows up in tone of voice. It says something about you as a company and your identity. And this is what tuning is. It's branding your presence as that copa internally and externally, so that it talks and walks and acts like you. So I'm all over this kind of yes. Finally, because I've been trying to create a boost podcast co-pilot thing forever and it's not able to because we have a very, because it's kind of. When I create the social media stuff, it's very my tone and I'm very edgy. I make sure that it's very personal. It shines through who we are, that we're a bit on the edge or we're not corporate. We're a bit refreshing and colorful and a bit kind of. We say what we want. So I want that to shine through, and so you guys have been following us for a while. You'll see the posts where I've tried to use AI, it's much more corporate and down to earth, and the ones where I'm writing it it's when it's very, you know, full of energy, cause he can't, it hasn't been able to replicate our style yet. So we'll see. If we start to use copilot tuning, maybe we'll also be able to create a bot that could actually make some of the descriptions for us or kind of tune the social media posts a little bit, for instance, and I think probably sometimes that would be a good thing for some of our listeners as well, because some of these posts are fairly big.

Speaker 3:

Also, something else that stood out to me was the multi-agent orchestration. So the idea that you have multiple agents working at the same time for you and that you have an orchestrator in the middle. This is one of the core concepts that you have to take on board if you're going to work with agents going forward. The reason for this is that an agent is at its best when it has a very specific task to do. If you ask it to do multiple things and on a wide range of topics and domains, it won't work as well. So if you have a very specific domain, a very specific task, it works the best, but of course then you would need more than one.

Speaker 3:

So having a set of agents and having an orchestrated in the middle is very important, and also this idea of discoverability. So just a few weeks ago you would have to manually set and establish which agents do you want and maybe also a bit which order you want these to work in, and define what agents this core orchestrator could access. Now, with discoverability, the description and the metadata on that agent is going to show the orchestrator what it can do and they'll be able to dynamically choose between agents that come up. And of course also you add a new agent to the mix, the orchestrator will automatically be able to choose that new agent without you doing anything. So that is so powerful and it's one of the major things that came out of Build.

Nick:

Yeah, and then, of course, to tie a little bit into that I'm not sure how deep we'll get into this but also the agent to agent protocols and the fact that agents can call other agents and have those interfaces as well. So it's not just you're working with something, you have these multiple agents in front of your face. It's also it's like if an agent's working on something, that it has the ability to reach out to other agents to do its job as well. So there's a lot of moving parts with all of this. So, yeah, that was a pretty significant I agree, definitely one of those big bang announcements, and there were so many. Oh so many.

Nick:

The other thing that you know. Going back to more the AI that a lot of us are used to, it's like, I think, probably our first experience with Copilot or Copilot Studio. What's the first thing you do? I'm going to create a new Copilot. What are you going to do? You're going to point it to a knowledge source, so you point it to a website or you point it to a pdf and then you can start asking questions and that's that.

Nick:

That's been the circus trick for co-pilot studio to show it off in five minutes for the last little while. But now it's gotten even better because with the knowledge features, you can add, upload multiple files, um there's or even point it to other things like dataverse or some other different connectors as well, um, and those are a lot of new features. So a lot of that core stuff that we're already using copilot studio for has gotten a lot more faster and or faster, smarter and giving and allowing you to have a lot more control with that too. So that was also something that it's one of these. Well, maybe I thought it did that anyway, but then you dig down to it Like, yeah, it did, but not to the not. You always kind of ran into some of these guard, these, these blockers.

Speaker 3:

some of these blockers have now been removed a little bit, and so these chatbots are chatbots, are agents, are a lot smarter even more smarter than we thought they were in the beginning, and we also have clever new tooling, including Python-powered code interpreter, which is so far off of what I know that I barely understand what it is, but I understand that it can interpret Python. That's good. You have Visual Studio support and early Rpa style capabilities, so that is fantastic. Um, and just ties into the whole thing. Uh, we also saw, yeah, sorry.

Speaker 3:

For instance, yeah, anything else you want to say about that yeah, yeah okay because a lot of the rage lately is about mcp servers, right, and so that's kind of the. There's a natural trend here, I think, in terms of MCP servers, and we saw an announcement about the Dataverse MCP chatbot, for instance, coming up this week.

Nick:

Yeah, and that was cool, and a couple of things Like, first off, it's easy to think about. Oh yeah, I can query Dataverse data. So, like you know how many sessions register to this event, if we have that stored in tables, how much sales have we done, and all this stuff. But then talking to some other people in the community and doing some of the stuff that I've been doing with, like PowerPages, for example, building web templates A lot of times you're building web templates because PowerPages talks to Dataverse.

Nick:

A lot of times you're building web templates because PowerPages talks to Dataverse. We need to tell GitHub, copilot the schema names and the field names of the particular tables we want to work with. And, of course, I've just been using XRM Toolbox, looking at the metadata browser, finding all that stuff, giving it to Copilot hey, use these, generate me some code. But then someone I think it might have been Daniel Lakovic said well, this is where if you use the Dataverse MCP server, you could get the agent to talk to that to pull up the metadata of things, because that takes a lot of time trying to drill down and find that If I have an agent that talks to the MCP Dataverse server. I haven't tried this, so I might just be totally talking out of my rear end here, but this is how I hope to use it is. This again is just another game changer in terms of getting things more efficiently in building code and getting to that place where, when you're building code, it knows about all of these things more naturally.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah, and also I'm a bit kind of far removed from MCP servers. Haven't played with it. Video from someone called David Gomez from a company called Neon they do Postgres database stuff where he talks about why MCP servers are not APIs and how people now started. There's a lot of services now that allow you to simply just translate your API into an MCP server, which is it's all good and well, but you're kind of missing out on a lot of opportunities here. It's not just access to data. You in MCP servers you can enable tools and resources as well. It didn't go into that, but he said kind of that as part of the package.

Speaker 3:

And if you simply just enable your API as an MCP server, the structured data of an API is very is rigor towards development and structured development. And structured data of an API is very is rigor towards development and structured development and structured data. And LLM is more like a human. It will ask questions in natural language and API isn't necessarily rigged for that. So you need to kind of transform your data a little bit and it's the metadata that you just talked about. That is the key here, because if you then enrich your data with metadata around it, the LLM will understand more quickly and more natively what the data is for and how to put it together with other sources and how to use it.

Speaker 3:

And also on the back of both this development and build, we had something called NLWeb come out, which is kind of on the. It's also an MCP server kind of idea. It's built on that technology. It's where you can create, you enable your website to become an MCP server-ish kind of service so that agents can more easily use it as a source. So it's like RSS feeds for websites, where you kind of structure your data on your website like an RSS feed that LLMs can easily digest and understand. So it's very interesting to see that come out. It's an open source Microsoft project, I. So it's very interesting to see that come out. It's an open source Microsoft project. I think it's Microsoft. I just need to check it's. Now I got a bit. I'm not 100% sure it's Microsoft's project, but it's open source either way and it's called NLWeb.

Nick:

Cool. So, speaking of MCP servers, I was literally talking to George Stabinski 30 minutes ago and we're talking about different things and talk about powerlifting and lights and all this stuff. So I'm stealing a bit of George's thunder here because I know he's presenting on stuff like this. He got one of the smart light bulbs you get, where you plug it in and you can connect through Wi-Fi. You can say turn on the light, it just seems the dimmer, and all that kind of stuff. He said he built an MCP server for the smart light bulb where you know, of course we've done experiments like that too Well, get power automate to turn on the light when you show up at home. But he set it up to an MCP server and he said you know something like oh, it's too bright in here, and then of course, the light dims a little bit.

Nick:

But then he even took it further. He said bit, but then he even took it further. He said send a message using morse code to the light, of course, that the ai was able to find. Do the morse code interpret like he like, if we did this a year ago, we would have uploaded the the morse code tables, we would have done all this other stuff. There was just like no, uh, send a message using morse code and the light just started flashing, the dashes and dots, um, automatically. So this, this to me, was such a great, um, very simple use case that you wouldn't really necessarily use, but in business, or but how these mcp servers really work and how ai enters into mcp servers. So it's more than just an ai, it's more than just data, it it's more than just data, it's interpreting it and yeah, anyway, sorry, I just kind of I, just when you were talking about MCP servers, like oh, I need to talk about the light bulb in CPs.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, the light bulb moment, Whoop, whoop. No, it's all good. And also, speaking about the web, I just need to touch on the PowerPages stuff that came out of Build and I know that we're biased because we are PowerPages people, but from an objective perspective, I thought that finally PowerPages got some love and juice at Build. It was. They announced a new security agent that's built on Sentinel technology, how you can now add custom Copilot agents from built in Copilot Studio to your PowerPages site. It will allow you to authenticate through it and you can have the same experience as you would have in another chatbot. It's not the old turn-based one, it's a completely new one and you can add whichever one you want.

Speaker 3:

You can now also bring your own code. Well, eventually I don't think that's GAI yet, but it's in preview code. Well, eventually I don't think that's GAI yet, but it's in preview which means that you can actually now plug PowerPages into any development language that you want to bring to it and you can vibe code to PowerPages if you now want to, and you can hook it up to Visual Studio Code and off you go. We also have the new Git integration that works with PowerPages. And finally, I have the UI preview, which I've looked for for so long, which enables me now to finally start using Visual Studio Code again on my laptop and not just in the browser, because it wasn't able to preview with all the PowerPages scaffolding before, so I would have to upload download to see my UI changes, but now I can see that directly in the preview in Visual Studio Code. So that's going to be fantastic and I can't wait to see all of these things flash up in my environment for power pages.

Nick:

Yeah oh yeah, and there's just and not just like in power pages. Well, yeah, the cool stuff with power pages, um, but even so, remember at the start of the year we said we were going to learn, react and pcf controls yeah well, now we don't, and then we decided not to smart.

Nick:

So this is, this is where the world of ai procrastinators win, because, um, I'm trying to find it. This is where they um, what do they call that? It's d2d. I've had the link here, but basically it's part of the app development within Power Apps, where they call it. Well, of course, there's plans and we'll talk about plans, which is plan designer? But the oh, I hit it up here Generate the AI tailored generated pages. So, with generated pages, this is where developers can create a fully customized user experience. In native React code, they just simply describe what they want the app or the page to do and then add the Dataverse tables, attach like whiteboard sketches and designs and things like that in natural language, and then it's going to generate this React interface and then it's going to generate this React interface. So, anyways, I've applied for the preview program. I can't wait to get my fingers into this. I'm also grounding myself to be a little disappointed, because I think it might not do as much as I think I hope it will do at day one. But, like everything, this is a progression and it also goes.

Nick:

And just a little shout out to my good friend nathan rose, just to build a little fuel in the fire. I had wrote a post a few weeks ago about um is low code dead because of vibe coding? And the kind of the thesis around that was why would we have a low code language when we could just describe vibe code and create pro code like react, like in typescript and javascript and stuff like that? Nathan took a little bit of offense to that, saying no, no, it should be generating power effects, and I totally agree. I mean, but this is all part and parcel to this. But again, this is a case of this whole idea of citizen developer doing low code. This is now we're now into a new chapter or the plot has now twisted a little bit that we still have these I don't know citizen developers, but now they're creating pro code directly. Um, so we'll sort of see how this evolves and, yeah, I'm really hoping to get in the early access and play around with this and report back here on this stuff.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, but it's interesting I look at this from the other direction and I go actually, now I have a real incentive to learn React because I see people post PCF components on the PCF gallery and they get pushback saying no, actually, what you've done here is very, very good, brilliant. I love it. Ui is great, but it's not secure enough.

Speaker 3:

And these are professional developers developing these tools, adding them to the general toolbox of the power platform, and even they don't know, they don't understand how the security works and get kind of feedback and pushback saying, no, actually, I think you need to reiterate because this is not secure enough.

Speaker 3:

I see that, yeah, this is enabling everyone, but I've seen what that looks like. It's like saying, oh, now, suddenly everyone can create a stunning app. No, developers will still not be able to create a stunning app because they don't even know what a stunning app is or what it looks like or what it feels like. So I'm kind of saying no, if I ever had an incentive to learn React, react, then this would be it, because it looks to me like python and react. It's kind of the two things that everyone's going to have to get on board with at some point. If you want to be a developer, pro developer, going forward, uh, so, yeah, no, I'm thinking. Actually, I want to be one of those people who can validate the code that has been created and and push back and say, no, this isn't good enough.

Nick:

Right, that's just me, no, no. No, it's cool and I feel a little bit at fault when you say developers, beautiful apps, but anyways, that's true, you've seen my stuff, but from the flip side, but from a learning perspective, what's cool. What I like about this is, if I create a Power App, it is getting better now. But let's just say, I create a Canvas app and I'm dragging buttons and all that. Originally, when we downloaded and looked at the code, it was all kind of JSON. It was really hard to read. You know, kind of bedded there.

Nick:

If this is creating React code, then I'm actually going to be able, in Visual Studio, look at that code, look at the TypeScript and then from there, from a learning perspective, like you were saying, this is the way I think this is our gateway to learn, because we almost start with the end result and then we can see how it was built. And then it gives us the opportunity to experiment, and I've already been doing this in GitHub Copilot, in Visual Studio Code going GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code going. Yeah, if I wanted to add a border around a panel on a webpage, what did I do before? I called up my CSS friends, how do I add a border. But now I can just ask my friend Copilot hey, I want to add a border around this particular panel, and it's going to go through and it actually highlights the code that it added. And then it can look oh, that's duh, that's how you add a border to a panel, right like that's. Yeah, that's actually pretty straightforward now that I see the code being generated.

Nick:

So I'm learning. That's what I like about it's not only is that I have this peer programmer I'm working with. This is a peer programmer that I'm learning from as well, and I know that when I started programming a thousand years ago, before the internet was invented and all this a lot of the ways I like learning was looking at someone else's code and also working with other developers side by side. Hey, we need to fix this. So here's what I'm going to do, like oh, okay, that's really interesting. So I do realize some people might do lazy ai and just generate the code, and yes, there's going to be issues. And. But from another standpoint, yes, it is like I said, co-pilot to, or all this stuff should be a collaborative effort yeah, and it always was and it always will be.

Speaker 3:

it's just I'm now scared to see people that shouldn't try to do everything. Do everything because they are squished at work. They need to produce stuff faster and quicker and they need to work for 10 people now because their workplace assumes that they have agents to do everything and that AI can create everything. And suddenly we're going to have a bit of an issue because no one will pay for quality apps anymore and if you don't know these things, then it will take you too long to figure it out or, you know, create security holes or whatever it is. So I'm not trying to be pessimistic, I'm trying to be realistic and also see where I fit into all of this as well. So that's kind of part of it, I think.

Nick:

And this is important. When we talk about other agents, like in terms of what we talked about earlier about playwright testing I see there's going to be testing agents that probably use things like playwright. So again, it's good that to know playwright, to see what the agent is generating for the testing, because we're going to need to tweak it, like that's what I'd find, even by coding. Yeah, it created that border around the panel, but it created in a weird color, so I still need to go in and tweak it. Yeah, it created that border around the panel, but it created in a weird color, so I still need to go in and tweak it. But then we'd also apply it's going to be creating new best practices.

Nick:

Best practices is run your security agent, your testing agent, run your efficiency agent, see what it comes back and it says yes, this code works, but there are potential security holes here. You need to address these. Here's how you address it. So me as a developer, looking at that, oh, I've learned something that I've introduced a possible security breach. By the way, this function was created. Oh, I could make this function more efficient because the efficiency agent has told me about this. So this is again, we're collaborating and it's. But you're right, if I just run it through the security agent and it comes back with all green check marks, yeah, I'm good. That's to me lazy AI and that's something we need to be careful of. We need to see why did we get green check marks? Are we doing best practices? And that's where this is again, there's both sides, but I do think again, embracing that collaborative spirit is probably a good way to go yeah, 100.

Speaker 3:

And I also like on this topic, I saw something on linkedin this week from someone called nick bibish um which was called the stingray model, which is a product design process in the ai era where they kind of go through you have the train and develop and iterate phases of a product design process and also kind of show where to use AI and where you would have a human-led part of the process. And it's very interesting because the human-led part is the start and the beginning and it's the AI thing in the middle. That is the majority of the AI stuff, where you train and you generate and you hypothesize. Before you even go into AI there has to be a prompt right and a human still has to create that prompt when we're starting off a process like this. So it starts with a human prompting the AI agent and then it's kind of just going off this massive amounts of data where you're experimenting. It's going off in 10 different direction, you're following up on all of them, you're iterating in your ID and everything. But as you are narrowing down, it's more and more you who is narrowing it down as a human. You then put more and more graduates in place. You're like let's focus on this. Let's narrow it down like that. No, we're looking at this, and then it's the human that actually then starts to close the gap into this one little point where this is what we want to go forward with.

Speaker 3:

And I loved seeing that as a visual, because it puts me in the place of this process going forward, and it made me feel more empowered as well. And it's right, and I do this when I chat with ChatDVD or whatever it is. Every day, I'll go in and I'll ask it all right, so this is what we're doing today. We're creating a new personal brand for me and I'll ask it all right, so this is what we're doing today. We're creating a new personal brand for me and I want it to be kind of both visual and aesthetic.

Speaker 3:

What would we start with? And it goes off and it's just massive amounts of ways you could go about it. And then me kind of okay, let's look at fonts today, let's look at logos today, let's look at colors today. And okay, let's look at fonts today, let's look at logos today, let's look at colors today. And I narrow it down for it and put the garlands in place. So I really feel like that resonated with me in terms of a process and I think it will with other people as well and it applies to other things than just design, but definitely any process in this AI era.

Nick:

And yeah, and it's done with the stingray, because the bra looks like a stingray fish. So it's a good visual and it's a good naming reference to that Good segue into iterating and processing about what was for the. It's called plans now. It used to be called plan designer but now it's called Power Apps Plans or Plans in Power Apps. Thank you, vice.

Speaker 3:

But Plans in Power Apps. Now it creates Power Pages. It's always Creative Flows and Agents. Why would they call it Plans in Power Apps, do we?

Nick:

have a whole episode on the Microsoft marketing naming stuff, because they always get it absolutely perfect, right? You know what they need. They need a naming agent.

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah, yeah, they do, but of course that would be based on data from Microsoft, so it would be just as shit. That's a problem. All right, moving on before I lose my MVP award. So plans in Power Apps, the UI for AI, Go Nick.

Nick:

So this is. It's kind of like as we're learning and all this stuff everybody keeps talking about. Okay, the user interfaces, as we know it will go away. Like you know, there's not going to be a user interface for apps. I'm sure we've heard variations of this, Like you know. So I'm like what, Like no, like humans still need to talk, like interface with software, and then, like no, the UI, like no, the ui is going away. You're going to interact through agents and co-pilots and I'm like and again when I started, before the internet, was invented, my first computer was a commodore 64. How did I interact with my commodore 64?

Nick:

you know like frank, yeah, thanks. Um, yeah, pretty much we'd go out and we crank it, get the, get the computer all wound up, and then we'd see the flashing thing and I would just start typing commands. I got to get it, yeah, anyways. Oh, you cracked me up.

Ulrikke:

Did you do this with train or thought Well, no, I'm trying to stay on the train.

Nick:

But of course now I'm like, anyways, so back on the train. But you know, like, anyways, so, but back on the trade. But you know, in those days this is how you interact with the computer you would actually start typing in like load this program, and then of course you had parameters like comma eight meant the disk drive, and or I want to. You would type in you know, print, print this thing, like so you're typing in all of these commands.

Speaker 3:

You remember all of these commands? Come on, this should be something. You were pushing that out ages ago. What?

Nick:

This is how I spent my teenage years is on my computer. Wow, Let me remember that it got burned in a ROM. But anyways, so then they're going. They're going. Oh, Copilots, Well, you're going, and then so. But so then?

Ulrikke:

they're going. They're going. Oh, co-pilots. Well, you're going to interact with co-pilots. It's like we're back to fucking command props again, like where we were You're right.

Speaker 3:

Actually, you're absolutely right. It's exactly the same thing.

Nick:

It. It needs a lot of more context and stuff that you could just go, yeah, sorry. So, all that being said, though, and then so I'm thinking about this, like we're not taking a lot of people take this as okay, I'm going to interact with my CRM system, interact with my accounting system. It's going to be a little, a little prompt and, like I don't want to type commands, like you know. Like you know, like you know, tell me how many cases I have to solve today, or I want to create an opportunity to do it like that. So we know that's not going to happen. So, if I look at something like plan designer, I can see sort of that being this is the, this is what we may start interfacing with that. Yes, the plan designer, I want to create a new app to manage events.

Nick:

What we see here already up in the corner, is we have there is the um, there's the user, what they call the eight. They have the three different agents. They have the process agent, they have the user persona agent, and then they have, like, the data agent. So we have these agents standing by. So to me, it's kind of like going into a room with a team and a whiteboard and say okay, team, you're good at UI, you're good at this, you're good at that, let's start working on a thing. And then what happens is that user interface adapts to what we're doing. So we ask here, we want to create an app to do that. Okay, the persona agent. He kicks in and he starts going okay, we're going to need an event manager, we're going to need a speaker, we're going to need an attendee, what's their experiences? And that starts showing up within the plan designer user interface. And then the user interface now goes okay, do you want to change anything? Do you want to reiterate on that? And then, yeah, we're still typing in commands, but it's not just print. You know, print blah, blah, blah, blah. It's okay. No, we want to change this. The event manager should also be able to do this. Uh, we don't need to worry about sponsors, so let's just remove that persona. Um.

Nick:

And then, even then, the prompts begin to generate on the bottom so you can click on that a little bit to go through the process, and then said okay, let's move on to, you know, the data site. So there's still a pre-defined process of sorts which, of course, you know, over time we can probably modify a little bit, but we're still following a little bit of a path or a sequence. But then the ui is not so much. There's not that big long checklist that we might have had if this tool was created five years ago, like we. Actually there were tools like that. Like even in power pages there was a tool that you could go and create websites, but basically it kind of goes through. So that's where I see it.

Nick:

So that was sort of my light bulb moment going. This is what they mean in terms of interfacing with the computer. Yes, it's not going to be the point and click and those apps will still exist, of course, but in terms of a lot of the management stuff and we also talk about Projectfia as well as another example of prompting and going through and analyzing the data and having it spit back and that whole user interface beginning to change depending on what the user is doing. So that to me kind of was a, you know, a bit of a light bulb moment. And then, of course, going into the plan, what plan, designer, plan, tool, whatever they're going to call it now um, of course it's added a lot new features. It does understand other tables you've created because you can do this through the solution.

Nick:

Apparently, I know that there's still some issues bringing in the common data model, so it still doesn't quite know what the contact is yet. From what I heard but I haven't played with it in the last couple of weeks or a few days when it changed it also generates things like PowerPages site. So it's doing so much more. But again, it really is, even though I think today we would still not use it to create a production system. We'd create proof of concepts in that process.

Nick:

But again it's beginning to show us a glimpse of the future, where we're going to be down the road in terms of either building software or just business software in general, that it is going to be more of a, an interactive thing and, yes, there might be the typing, but this is also where I see the voice.

Nick:

Now we're getting into star trek where, okay, computer, uh, create this for me, and then it comes back and there's that going to be those interfaces and that's going to be a lot more real, like real, probably sooner rather than later. So to me, this is where I feel a lot more comfortable, because it's like, yeah, we have this new user interface, but we still need solution architects in the loop now, will we need as many developers? That's kind of the bigger question. But in terms of solution architecture and building apps and, reiteration, taking those business requirements, this is where, yes, we have these ai tools helping us. We have these ANA tools helping us out. We have these new non-standard UI that we're used to interfaces all becoming part of this. So, again, it's still very fuzzy and unclear, but it is every day. For me, that picture is getting a lot clearer because we now have tangible things that we're working with.

Speaker 3:

And I think what you just said there is kind of one of the key aspects that I think people are forgetting. Even Tony Stark, when he talks to Jarvis, pulls up imagery and points and clicks and zooms and throws away and draw and kind of fiddle with it, right? So it's the idea that you can do everything through voice. Humans have a very bad short-term memory. We like to get overviews of things. We've always needed that. Model-driven apps have survived for 30 years. For a reason. It's because of that kind of formatting. It's a reason why Excel is still the biggest competitor to Power Platform, because seeing data in a structured overview has always been a need in business and I, for one, don't see that going away, because, as humans, that is how we structure information in our heads. We need that visualization. So chat, gpt now the chat-based thing it's okay, but it's not good enough. I miss kind of being able to have more of a richer interface for that to show me.

Speaker 3:

And Project Sophia is, like you said, such a good example of that where you prompt it for something. It's going to draw up the data. It's going to be like a dashboard. You can have different modules. You can zoom in, you can make one bigger, one smaller. You can drag and drop and move them around and then you can use the cursor to dive in and get another view. So it's I.

Speaker 3:

I don't buy into the idea that, um, that ai, the ui is going away just because we have ai. But that being said, though, for for some tasks, when I use ChatGPT, I prefer voice, having that conversation, that mind, when I'm brainstorming, when I'm not really sure where I'm going and I want to have a conversation with someone about something that I'm exploring and it's exploratory, sure, because then I don't need that structured information. It's all just very intangible and it's a mind map kind of idea. I love that. So each thing for its own use is what I would say, and any one of the things that a traditional UI is going to go away completely don't understand humans very well, and we've been saying this for a few episodes already and I still believe that to be true.

Speaker 3:

So with that, I see that we're kind of closing. It's going to be a long episode, but I just wanted to make sure we had a bit of progress. Also, it's funny just going through the list here you have flow, advanced approvals, which kind of almost ties into this Because you look at something like adaptive cards, for instance, is a very good example. You can have an automated process as much as you want, but then, as soon as you need a human in the loop, what is the first thing Microsoft does? It creates a visual card to represent that data point. That shows you the need. We have to see what it is that we're doing.

Nick:

Yeah, so that was my kind of attempt on a segue to flow advanced approvals yeah, for sure, I mean, and then, but yeah, the top of the ui of advanced approvals, but the other, just while we're still talking a little bit about the model driven apps of the, the agent activity. I want to call it the activity flow or the activity timeline, but it's the agent flow again, having that human in the loop to see what the agents are up to and what they did along the way and then, if they need to, um, actually ask you a question kind of like yeah, okay, but before we delete the production database, are you sure we should do this because that's what we agents decided? Um, yeah, maybe no, um, so that kind of thing, uh, but, yeah, so, but yeah, in terms of the, uh, the power, um, the advanced approvals, because we do have a um, a new. Yeah, this was my thing, right, this is the thing we were talking about before, that's to learn advanced approval in agent flows. Now again, we've heard from april, agent flows are really just home flows, but this is the flows that the agents will kick off and of course, we, you know, still need those approvals. Again, the human in the loop. And also, this is where we get into the governance and the safeguards to yeah, make sure agents don't delete prod, make sure our agents aren't ordering.

Nick:

Oh, we see that your, your old car has a dent in it, so let's just order you a new ferrari because we have your bank information, um, those types of things. So again, this is uh, again that's all, yeah, um, so there's, this was a new thing, I do believe. Is it still in preview? Yeah, it still has the preview tag on it. Um, but again, this is, this is all part and parcel of everything else that's coming, and these are the types of things that you might just sort of miss in the whole wave of news of stuff that could be very valuable in your, in your day-to-date. You had a good example of something april showed that actually was very much just in time for you about the document generation. You want to quickly talk about that. I know we're jumping around, but yeah, yeah, yeah, oh.

Speaker 3:

And then I have to put a pin in something else. Sure, so what she showed was one of the new templates that you have in Copa, the studio where you actually have the AI, or maybe it's one of the AI fields which was document processor, which, as automa it's when you as a template. What it does is it will monitor an inbox, so when an email comes in, it will draw the documents and put them in SharePoint, for instance, and it will then also create metadata and put that metadata in Dataverse and it will create a whole system around it. And actually we're currently working on a hackathon thing which is a procurement process and we're like, hmm, hmm, isn't that exactly what we're building for that? So, because it's it, and I think it's such a such a familiar use case where you have unstructured data coming in in an inbox somewhere and you want to put the documents where they belong, the metadata where they belong, you want to have collaboration in teams, you want to have an agent on top that you can have a conversation with, you want to use Loop for the content, kind of blobs. There are so many things and this comes up again and again. So Microsoft's very good at creating templates, and that is a fantastic segue into the next thing I wanted to mention briefly, and that is the AI Scenarios Library. It just popped up in my feed.

Speaker 3:

It's under the adoption umbrella at Microsoft, where you can go through and look at different scenarios based on different use cases, based on different industries, based on different user roles, and you'll be looped through an experience. It's I love the user interface so clear and concise. And what kind of technologies would you use for this use case? You'll be looped through an experience. I love the user interface. It's so clear and concise. And what kind of technologies would you use for this use case? What would the process look like? What kind of products do you use?

Speaker 3:

And I know that this is top of mind for so many people Our customers. This is the one thing they ask us for. We need to understand what the use cases are, because we can't imagine this to the extent that we can see what it can do for us. What can it do for us? The exploration about use cases in AI. So this is very much to the point of helping out to expand your mind, to see what it can actually do. And then, of course, you look at something like document processing template and you go, oh yes, that I need. That would help. That would save us so much time. So, yeah, that is just what I wanted to mention.

Nick:

Cool. What else do we have?

Speaker 3:

I have a few more other small things that just came up that I think was a lot of fun things that just came up. That I think was a lot of fun. Let me just mention David Wyatt had a blog post and a post on LinkedIn about transactions in Power Automate. So remember last time we talked about Scott Juro's video where he shows transactions in plugins. I'm sorry, you could do transactions in old school plugins all along. Now you can do them in function, which used to be called local plugins, but functions is kind of new, and now you can do transactions through that.

Speaker 3:

And now David Wied is showing us how to do transactions using perform a change set request actions in Power Automate. So just wanted to kind of pull that little thread from last time over to this one. So if this is tooting your thing and what you need to do, then you have another way of doing that, and it's, of course, talking about transactions and the change set, so that if you do one change after another and one of the last one fails, it rolls back all of your changes, which is very important in terms of data to keep your data clean and up to date. So very good job, david, and also a good excuse to mention David again, because he always we always have content from David. Usually we haven't in a few episodes of ours about high tech.

Nick:

And I think I'm not sure if I've mentioned I got to meet David in person finally at MVP Summit. Very briefly, david in person finally at MVP Summit? Very briefly, no, you didn't tell me. Yeah, it was good. So shout out to David. It's nice to actually put the face, the name and someone who generates all this awesome content that we like to talk about.

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah, definitely 100%. Thank you so much. And then we had a few fun things that we wanted to mention. I just love this this is right up my alley and I'm going to swear because I found a website called justfuckingusehtmlcom which is just so close to my heart. It is a black background, white text, you know, times New Roman font kind of website which just goes through the basic of HTML and I think it's kind of a kick to libraries and components and UI frameworks.

Speaker 3:

It's just Jesus Christ, sometimes you can just use simple HTML. It's enough, just a little bit of CSS and some JavaScript. Maybe it doesn't have to be all that complicated. I think people forget about that sometimes, that some use cases actually just going back to the basics, maybe this is going to be a great new thing for vibe coding. It's like, well, maybe the old good old HTML and an index file on your web somewhere is going to be the future. I don't know, but I find going back to the basics very refreshing. And also and this, I think, is no, this is also mine. I just wanted to put a little mention in here from Mark Christie and now I think I've lost you Right. So we lost Nick. We'll see if he comes back. I'll just stop the recording and we'll kick it off again.

Nick:

All right. So we had a bit of a technical issue. I think I'm back. So you were ranting. You are back. You were ranting about just use fucking html.

Speaker 3:

And, yes, I was laughing yeah, and then I finished that off, um, and then I yeah, and then I was done. So I don't think we need to to dive more into that. Um, actually, cool, I think we're just gonna round things off. Um, do you to kind of share a few words of what you're doing, because this is going to be published on Wednesday? Do you want to share a bit about what you're doing this week, what's next for you that people can track and so that I can keep track, I can listen back.

Nick:

Okay, so by the time this is released, for me, dynamics Mines will have finished up and then we're moving on to the next. I'm actually going on vacation that's what I'm doing at the end of this week. So there will be that, followed by European Power Platform Conference with a workshop and we have a couple sessions, and then I'm actually going to Collab Days, netherlands, which is like the Saturday following European Power Platform Conference, and then a few months of relaxation until things pick up again in September. Yeah With Collab Days.

Nick:

Finland Nordic Summit, Power Platform Communities Conference. I think, yeah, that's all I have for sure, but I may or may not have added more session submissions to other things along the way.

Speaker 3:

Well, I bet you have, but it's going to be good to have a bit of holiday, because I'm going to do more of the same thing. We're going to meet up at EPPC is going to be the next thing for me as well. I'm going to have a week's holiday after that, and, of course, summer holiday in Norway is where everyone takes four weeks off and just do nothing and really looking forward to that, and so then I'm going to charge the batteries for fall conference season. So it's going to be pretty hectic this year as well, and I'm excited about it. It's going to be a lot of fun. So with that, I think we're's going to be pretty hectic this year as well, and I'm excited about it. It's going to be a lot of fun, cool. So with that, I think we're just going to close it off and enjoy the sun and a bit of a good afternoon where we are at, and I hope you guys have a splendid rest of your week, and I hope that you guys at Dynamics Minds are really tired when it's Wednesday evening.

Nick:

And now I can finally turn on social media again. No, no, no, yeah, but this is how LinkedIn gets you, because I'll do the same thing. Oh, there's an event that I wanted to go to. I didn't go. And then I say, okay, I'm going to be off social media, which helps. But then stupid LinkedIn more on the weekends. It's like I see posts from like three weeks ago and I don't want to see this. I don't want to be reminded. I see posts from like three weeks ago and I don't want to see this. I don't want to be reminded.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I do the same thing because when you're in it, it's so hard to keep up with because you're in a session. You want to know what it's about no-transcript head when the weekend comes. So yeah, you're right, I have to stay off social media for the whole week. All right, okay, it was good chatting with you today. Today we had a really good time, as always, and I think we got um a good dose of ai today as well, and we're gonna keep it up yeah all right, right, okay, have fun thanks, check with you later yeah, catch you later.

Speaker 3:

Bye, thanks for listening and if you liked this episode, please make sure to share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. Make sure to leave a rating and review your favorite streaming service and makes it easier for others to find us. Follow us on the social media platforms and make sure you don't miss an episode. Thanks for listening to the Power Platform Boost podcast with your hosts, Ulrike Akerbeck and Nick Dolman, and see you next time.

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