Power Platform Boost Podcast

Summer Vibes (#64)

• Season 1 • Episode 64

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Nick:

Awesome and I love people that learn in public. It's an expression I've heard before and that's a great way to share and kind of get the encouragement and motivation, Because you go in public and you say you're going to build something and people want to see it. They're going to hold you accountable to it, so good job.

Ulrikke:

And then some people just don't care that they announce that they're going to do something in public and never, ever, ever do. You know, some people are like that. I'm not going to point fingers or anything, but you know, some people are weird like that, I guess.

Nick:

In the fullness of time. I'm sure you'll get to these things that we talked about in the past.

Ulrikke:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Power Platform Boost podcast, your timely source of Power Platform news and updates, with your hosts, Nick Doelman and Ulrikke Akerbæk. Hey, Nick.

Nick:

Hey, Ulrikke, how are you doing?

Ulrikke:

Yeah, I'm hot. It's 30-something. It's been full sun all week and half the week before, so it's not normal here for it to be this hot, but I love it. I love every second, every sunray, everything. It's just I'm baked, so if I'm not fully functioning it's just because my mind is a bit kind of mush, but yeah, that's okay.

Nick:

Everybody's enjoying the summer vibes right now, I'm sure. And for those of you who don't like the heat, just remember six months from now, when it's minus 28 and you're freezing your butts off. Just think back to these days that you're experiencing right now.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, exactly, but I'm happy either way. I love snow and I love the cold, and I love the sun and I love the heat. Sometimes it does take a toll on my cognitive abilities, so that's kind of just a bit of a waiver. But yeah, how are you other than the weather?

Nick:

Oh yeah, doing great, basically doing a lot of working. I like to describe myself as working on my business, not in my business the last week or two, so really focusing on rebranding work and learning new things and things like that. Just because I'm kind of project, work right now is kind of a little bit on hold over the summer, which is great, so it's taking that opportunity to learn new things and, of course, other stuff as well going to the gym training for the next big powerlifting competition and experiencing a few little aches and pains here that I'm working through with my coach, but for the rest, I can't complain, life is good. And then going to concerts as well.

Nick:

There's a big music festival here in Ottawa called Blues Fest. For those of you who I know we have, I know I have listeners from Ottawa, they know all about Blues Fest. But we my daughter and I saw Green Day on Friday night and it was freaking awesome. So good, just. It was just such a great time. The music, just everybody singing along, the crowd reacting. It was probably one of the best shows I've seen in a long time. So, yeah, can't complain In a good spot here.

Ulrikke:

Fantastic. I'm so envious they have kids that age that can go to those kinds of concerts. I can't wait for my kid to be that age, so that's gonna be good, yeah and and my kid wants to go with me.

Nick:

She's like she was excited to like be with me at the. It's always like it was a two-way thing, so it's not like you know. She's kind of like oh, dad, you're coming. It was more like yeah yeah, we're going. We're gonna see green day and we were listening we went on a couple road trips last week and, of course, listening to spotify the bands. We're going to listen here and see. Yeah, it was really cool oh, that's awesome.

Ulrikke:

I'm so happy for you that you're having such a good time and get a bit of kind of summer holiday feeling as well. Uh, that's good. I didn't. Yeah, everyone needs it, and I, the more I talk to people outside of kind of the nordics, that don't really know what the kind of the common holiday thing is about, because we do take full of july off, just everyone at the same time and how that works, the I yeah, it just makes me appreciate this system more than I ever have before, really. So, uh, yeah, because every everyone deserves a bit of downtime and just absolutely detox from all of it, um, every now and again. So it's so good.

Nick:

But we still get.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, exactly, but we don't stop, we just keep cooking. And we're going to give you a show today as well, with the news and updates, because so last week we had our Release Notes episode, which of course we couldn't cover that and the news and updates and our OneNote is full of news articles from the week and the week before. So we just couldn't not do an episode now just because there's so many things to talk about. So we will try to keep it short and just talk about the most important things that we kind of discovered the last few weeks.

Nick:

So talk about the release plans and I think I'm just going to segue, I'm going to jump ahead a little bit into in our Power Platform section was a website that Yuka I'm not sure it's not Yuka's site, but he pointed out but it's a site. It's a community site, it's actually a Power BI report, but it's called releaseplansnet. Have you ever seen this before? It's really cool, basically.

Ulrikke:

Talked about it on the podcast before actually.

Nick:

Okay, oh yeah, I guess Absolutely You're right and it's just, I guess, another little reminder, because Yuka did do a post on very much kind of echoing what you said about there wasn't a whole lot in this particular release wave and you did some comparisons of the number of items and again referred again to this website that shows the dashboard. So it's a great resource for anybody following along and wants to see what their favorite feature or if their favorite feature disappears before it gets released. It's a good way to kind of keep track of these things. So, again, we'll put that link in the show notes so you guys can check that out and use that as kind of a follow along with the release plan Because, as we know, these things change. And, of course, if you've missed it, check out our episode from last week where we go through the release wave two and we hear a go on a teenage rant about not having enough, not having enough news and updates for sure.

Ulrikke:

But luckily for me, the community pulls through and give us more than enough things to talk about. So, yeah, and not all news are kind of. Some news are just small little highlights. That just makes my day a teeny, weeny bit better.

Ulrikke:

For instance, rene Modery's post where he talks about because he's the person behind PowerDocu. And he's the person behind PowerDocu and if you don't know what PowerDoc is, it's a tool you can use to document your Power Automate flows. It's fantastic, it's phenomenal, and now I kind of use the embedded chat co-pilot studio in Power Automate to kind of document it. But what PowerDocu will give you is a visual representation of your flow. And then he thought why can't I do that with the Copa Studio agents and chat and bots?

Ulrikke:

So that's what he's working on and it's not finished, it's not out there yet, but he just posts that on LinkedIn like this is what I'm working on currently and what you get then is you get feedback and you get encouragement and you get oh, remember to add this thing. And you get kind of engagement around something to see how well it resonates and just love to see that kind of initiatives. And also some of the comments are like oh fantastic to finally have a face to the name to the tool that I love. So thank you for just pointing out that you were the guy behind PowerDocu. So I just wanted to shout out a little bit to Renaitis, give him a little limelight for the amazing job that he does.

Nick:

Awesome and I love people that learn in public. It's an expression I've heard before and that's a great way to share and kind of get the encouragement and motivation, because you go in public and you say you're going to build something and people want to see it. They're going to hold you accountable to it.

Ulrikke:

so, yeah, good job and then some people just don't care that they announce that they're going to do something in public and never, ever, ever do. You know, some people are like that. I'm not gonna point fingers or anything, but you know it's uh.

Nick:

Some people are weird like that, I guess all in the uh, in the fullness of time, I'm sure you'll you'll get to these things that we talked about in the past yeah, but you do do them.

Ulrikke:

That's the most irritating and impressive thing about you. So you just follow through, you just do um. Yeah, I wish I had the kind of time that you got, because I don't have a life. That's what it is very funny, all right, okay. So, moving on to something else that I saw on, oh, maybe, no, okay, let me, I'll let you pick something, so then we can just go okay so we're talking about co-pilot studio, um, speaking about learning in public and sharing stuff.

Nick:

Mat Matthew Devaney posted an amazing video on Copilot Studio and it's titled how I how I built a generative orchestration agent.

Nick:

And this is something I want to see more of this, because people talk a lot about agents and you see these demos that Microsoft does and, oh, look, you get, get an agent to talk to your HR system and do all this like kind of high level, I don't know theoretical stuff. Matthew wrote this agent that basically, is a way that you could put in some email addresses and that will find times to hold a meeting, like within your organization, and he really amazingly broke it out, how he built it, how he had the different topics going in Copilot Studio, how he did the adaptive card to collect this information. It was just put together very good. To me, it was like, oh okay, I wish we had more of these examples of people building useful agents, because I think this is just going to help inspire people and kick off those creative sparks. So thank you, matthew, for that post. Again, we'll put that in the show notes so you can check that out for yourself if you've missed it.

Ulrikke:

So, yeah, really a great, great video yeah, very good post and, of course, matthew is a pro. So just watching his videos and how he kind of goes through the narrative and how he does it for me that's half the thing it's like, oh, such a professional and I just get inspired by the work that he does, so it's very good. Also, something in terms of talking about agents.

Ulrikke:

I saw a good friend of mine, michael maymeyer. We met at ebc this year. He's an amazing photographer, always make sure to capture the moment. So I thank you, michael, for all the fantastic photos you take when we're out and out in a boat on these conferences. But also he's a great techie and he shared something that Carson Gross shared this week from the message center emails that you get. So when you're an admin in message centers I think I mentioned this a couple of episodes ago as well you get these emails as an admin with news and updates, and Carson's come into the habit of sharing those out on LinkedIn for all of the other people that aren't admins and doesn't get these emails and can't see what's on the message center.

Nick:

So one of these emails as they come into your inbox, like or ignore those emails.

Ulrikke:

That's right, because there are a bazillion of them and if you're an admin of everything, like global admin, for instance, you get a lot of these. Um, so two things you wanted to highlight a single sign-on ssl for external data sources for agents, so agents can now connect to external data sources without repeated manual authentication, enabling smoother and more secure integrations. And that means that we can now authenticate, kind of like a connector that you can set that up with your agent and then you don't have to authenticate every time that agent wants to use that connector for the service that you want it to use. And also, you can now publish your agents to WhatsApp, which is phenomenal, because we all use WhatsApp for events especially, right, it's a really good way of communicating and also talks to the omni-channel type experience that you want. So that's really cool. We want these agents to show up where we are and not the other way around, so I think that's very good news.

Nick:

Oh, that's amazing. I'm not sure which technology Air France uses, but what I love about flying Air France is you can actually communicate with them through WhatsApp and you can say I want to change this flight, or here's my code and whatever. And it might be half an hour before they get back to you, based on whether it's an agent doing this or whether it's an actual human, but it's just. To me it's so much easier than waiting on the phone and waiting. You know the horrible elevator music and everything like that. So the more we can see these WhatsApp agents for just customer service scenarios, I think it's a win-win for everyone.

Ulrikke:

Oh yeah, yeah, 100%, and soon you'll have an agent that you could just put in. Get in touch with that agent and then off you go. Maybe.

Nick:

Exactly.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, also something in terms of agent and kind of legal perspective. There was an announcement this week that you now have a new contract processing pre-built model in Power Automate that you can use with Power Apps is actually AI Builder, that this feature is kind of wrapped around, where you just give it a high resolution image of a legal document and then it will process what comes out of it. And they also introduced a term that I haven't heard before, ocr, which is optical character recognition, which is then it reads the characters on the image, optical character recognition capabilities and analyzing and extract key fields from the contract entities. So that is really neat.

Nick:

Have you not heard that term before? Oh, okay, so that's because you're young and I'm old. That's been the term. Ocr has been around for like a thousand years. I remember my first job when we were doing material safety data, building a material safety data sheet database, and I won't get too much of the technical details, but I remember talking about OCR at that time, but at that time that the technology was so bad. You'd try to scan something and it just couldn't figure it out. This is one of those things where we'd spend months building the software. We actually had a team of people that were rekeying the actual faxes and whatever into a database, into a database, and I just that's a situation. If I look back at it now I could build an app in an afternoon that would basically replace five of those people that were working full-time all year round and get the same amount of work done in a day. So yeah it. Just when you said OCR, like, and you said it was a new term, like, or did you say it was new to you?

Ulrikke:

but it was like wait a minute, I was new to me. I see these acronyms all the time and I see OKR mean other things, but in this kind of context, that's what it means and I keep reminding myself to say what things are, because these acronyms kind of and also I don't want to be one of those people that rant because of acronyms, because that's how the world goes around, but also it's important to speak it out, to speak to what it is. But yeah, so you had other news on local and AI stuff.

Ulrikke:

A few people that actually rant even to the quality that we do or better than we do.

Nick:

Yeah, and this is kind of have it under our section of AI stuff there are people that actually rant even to the quality that we do or better than we do. Yeah, and this is kind of have it under our section of AI stuff and of course, it changes on a week-to-week basis in so many things. This was a post called no Code is Dead. It was on the newstackio. It's been shared on LinkedIn by Joel Lindstrom, who is a former MVP and well-known in the community. By Joel Lindstrom, who he former MVP and well-known in the community.

Nick:

Ryan Cunningham was one of the folks that were interviewed or quoted in this article, with a lot of different industry leaders talking about, you know, the rise of vibe coding and building applications in AI. And just the title, of course, is very click-baity and of course, I'm guilty because I posted a video a couple months ago basically saying you know, no code is dead loglib vibe coding, which generated a little bit of discussion. But again it's going through about the evolution of apps and, of course, being able to. People are talking about oh well, you know, ai can never do as good of a job as a programmer to other ones basically saying, yeah, ai is going to completely take over the whole business and everything like that. Of course, some Ryan Cunningham talked about Microsoft's position of them building more agentic apps and kind of trying to push that narrative and that story through, like less apps, more agents kind of thing, and it was a really interesting read. It was a very long read so we will put the link again in the show notes, but it's interesting if this is something you're following along and kind of wondering where your future will be. So there's a lot of good viewpoints that you can kind of make your own decision on this or kind of get your own viewpoints.

Nick:

What I found interesting on this article was it was very focused on app development exclusively.

Nick:

They didn't really touch on a lot on how AI, in my mind, in terms of vibe coding, is also going to help with going through and optimizing for performance, locating bugs, checking for security.

Nick:

I think it's all of a bigger package. But at the end of the day, as I'm playing more and more at these tools, including Plan Designer and some of these other ones, I'm thinking we need to still have the human orchestrator or the human shepherd or babysitter as it generates this code, and I think you do need to have a. You don't have to be necessarily an expert, but understand the logic of what AI is generating and as we architect these solutions. So it's really again kind of keeping that narrative going about where we're going with applications, and we talked about this last week as well, about how we see the Power Platform going with a lot of these new tools like the single page applications and Power Pages, the you know code pages, the code apps, all of this, all this interesting stuff, so interesting article. Check it out as you're, as like all of us, learning and trying to absorb where the industry is going.

Ulrikke:

Yep, it is a. It's something my mind keeps going in this loop when I read these kinds of articles, because I agree, and then I think of the consequences and like, yeah, maybe it's going to take my job, and then I think what is the job that I can never do? And then it's, and then it's just kind of go full circle. It's very interesting to see, kind of when the industry leaders talk about where this platform is headed and what the tools that we use every day as professionals, where it's moving for us to be prepared for what's coming, and we talked about this before how it's so important to kind of be in the split where we keep our current tools and knowledge up to date with the current state of the products that we are using every day, but also being able to keep up with the new developments.

Nick:

Yes, and remember folks, if you're a pro developer, don't worry, AI is not going to take your job, but Steve Mordew may take your job Moving on segueing into the next article and this kind of ties in a little bit with this, and this is something I think I talked about before and it's something I know. Steve posted something on LinkedIn about how, since he's no longer an MVP, his goal is to be able to be mentioned on our podcast.

Ulrikke:

So, steve, we're mentioning your name, as we have so many times.

Nick:

Absolutely, but this is a great article. Yeah, he should sponsor us. What do you think? Yeah, steve, are you gonna be a sponsor for the boost podcast?

Ulrikke:

buy us a beer at least, and you'll get a rubber dock and maybe a hug next time I see you.

Nick:

Yes, all right yeah, but you talked about these five coding experiments and this is something that I've been talked about in. This as well is with these new tools and like I would also throw like plan designer. This as well is with these new tools and like I would also throw like plan designer into this, too is with these tools you can take some of these ideas that you've had floating in your head and, like what steve is saying, that he wouldn't necessarily hire programmers to develop it, but now he has access to the tools that he can try out some of these ideas, he can build some of these proof of concepts, and that's basically the kind of throwing that out there as a, I think, kind of a motivation for any of us. Even if you're not technical, if you have an idea for an app, even if it's not necessarily going to be in production, you can start using some of these tools within the Microsoft ecosystem or even outside to begin to build these things and try them out. And I think it's going to be great for some customers because they can build these proof of concepts, and it's all about showing versus telling sometimes, right?

Nick:

Well, here's this app that I built using this vibe coding tool. It's not perfect. I would like it to do this, but here you know, hand it over to like you and I as solution architects. Here's kind of where we're going with this. So very interesting Again these are. This is a year ago. We wouldn't even be talking about this. This is how fast these things are going. So I think some of these tools is really to help move app development along very quickly and also kind of allow for things to be done a lot more efficiently, not even just on the AI tools, but just for the pure communication of designing apps and agents and all of this fun technology. We can kind of get these visualization of these proof of concepts or these MVPs built a lot quicker and a lot faster.

Ulrikke:

Isn't Steve the one that kind of always ranted about all the shitty little apps? I think it's funny that, coming from someone who's ranted about shitty little apps for like five years straight now, he's encouraging everyone to build a freaking app. Steve, get your shit together. Okay, it's not going to be an agent here and a thousand shitty agents. I've seen that. Isn't that the article we mentioned last time?

Nick:

Yeah, that's true.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, that's true, All right, so over to more, actually more solid stuff. The Power Platform is now moving, shifting gears completely, and this is something that all developers should know and keep in mind. I'm going to use words, I don't know what I mean. So the title is PowerPath from API and SDKs, from UX first to API first, and this is a shift from the whole platform, from the whole platform. So, yeah, so the article kind of what it starts off saying is that Power Platform has kind of been administered and set up and configured through Power Platform Admin Center. Having that UX first experience has been the entry point. That's how we have admin and discovered and worked with Power Platform traditionally, what they're actually doing today. We're taking a bold step forward. We're transforming Power Platform into an API-first ecosystem where every feature in PPAC is backed by a well-documented, public, accessible API, which means that you can now kind of it sounds to me like infrastructure as code in a way where everything that you could do through PPAC is now going to be accessible through an API and it's actually going to be API first. So, which means that they're going to kind of make sure that you can cover everything through the API and SDK, the software developer toolkit. Software developer toolkit. They're going to be developer toolkits for all languages and across all the products. So they've now officially launched at build the C-sharp SDK and they're now going to just build more of these for TypeScript and Python and Platform Admin through Logic Apps and Power Automate. There's going to be developer kits kind of for all, covering all angles in Python and Platform Admin through Logic Apps and Power Automate. There's going to be developer kits kind of for covering all angles. And then, of course, you have CLI and PowerShell support and you have the MCP server support for Power Platform. And this is kind of huge, I think, to announce a shift this big. And also it kind of shows you for me at least, and this is just my opinion, keep in mind this shows me where we're going.

Ulrikke:

So the UI bit is going away and we had this conversation not so long ago. We talk about coding apps and all these apps and yeah, all of that and that's going to replace this here. You're always going to need to see your own systems. No, you're not, Because who's going to use it? There's not going to be anyone who has the job of collecting and enriching that data. It's going to be agents having access to public APIs or subscriptions to that kind of information, storing the metadata of who of these in this public repertoire is your customers, for instance, keeping that information up to date on its own. It's going to be agent to agent communication and data flow.

Ulrikke:

So the UI of everything. Who's going to need a website when all information you want to produce as a company is accessible through agents and NAIs? You just need a way of providing that information, which is an MCP server, an 8A protocol. That's what's going to be the UI. There's not going to be a UI going forward. It's a bold statement, but I think this is, and this is not just the only sign that we're seeing of this, but I think it's a significant kind of signpost of where we're actually going. My opinion statement you might disagree and I hope you do, so you can get out of conversation about it.

Nick:

Not completely, I still think in terms of the user interface for the PPAC. I don't see that going away anytime soon, but what it does mean is for those, a lot of the let's take the initial, the first ring of this by having the AI and the SDKs for that. If you're going through, if you're creating things like you want to set up a new developer, you have a new developer, you're onboarding. We've been in projects where we have a new developer onboarded. Of course, you know whether we're working. If we're working on shared environments, it's one thing, but sometimes we want to get to a point where the developer can have their own isolated environment and the ALM and things like that. Well, that involves going through creating a Dataverse developer instance, assigning them permissions, making sure that's set up in the ALM pipelines, all of this stuff. Now, if you've established your own internal corporate policy of those 10 steps that you need to do Now, you can write a script to do that. Here's the script new developer script. Boom, does all those things, sends out the emails that signs of security, does all that stuff. Because it's all API first. That's sort of the first level of this, and then I think you're right in terms of now. This is also.

Nick:

Instead, we're going to get an agent to do this. So it's like oh, we're onboarding bob, as you know, a new person in our company. The agent will go out and begin because it has this api access to be able to go do all this stuff. Now there might be still some approvals as part of that process and that kind of thing, but I think you're right.

Nick:

The whole idea of building a ui interface provided by microsoft for this. I think there will be one for a while, but eventually we won't need it because we have those APIs. So, whether we build our own user interface or we tie that into our agent user interface of the agents, just talk in the background and do all this stuff, it's kind of setting up the platform for that. So I don't think you're wrong, but I also think there still has to be a way for a human to interject with this. So, whether it's a little chatbot, it's probably going to be more voice. I would actually say, if you want to see the future, take a look at Star Trek, where they're like, basically, computer, spin me up a new dataverse instance.

Ulrikke:

Hey, here you go, but that's the same with me and ChatGPT today. I don't write to ChatGpt, I talk to it.

Nick:

Yeah, yeah, and it'll be the same thing like, hey, chat gpt, I'm research, I like I've been living in chat gpt and co-pilot like all last week as I'm kind of building, doing business planning and things like this. And yeah, it's a conversation, it's not, it's not me. Well, it is me thinking about a lot of things, but it's conversations. It's asking me questions and what about this and articulating all of this stuff. And yeah, it's a it's a conversation. But yeah, in the practical day to day it's like I want to be able to say, oh, I just bought this thing off Amazon, here's the receipt, and the agent says okay, and just runs with it, kind of thing. Right, so yeah, yeah.

Ulrikke:

And you imagine just going back to the topic of kind of having that infrastructure crash code approach to Power Platform admin and PPAC. How about going and saying, like you said, I'm going to onboard PED or whatever it is, or why don't this new person have access to this? Or I need a new developer? Remind me here. Or you want to just prompt an agent for that and not going through and do it and error handling, troubleshooting, all those things. If that agent actually works, then, yeah, that's what we're used to and it's going to be the same thing.

Ulrikke:

As you know, back in the day when we went from paper and you think I'm not old when we went from paper to digital, to the computer, you know people like well, I worked with some tourist associations, right, and you can imagine the small little huts up in the Norwegian mountains. They still have paper, you know, in this kind of folder thing, right. And then the youth come in through the summer and they want to have a summer job and they go what is this paper thing in the pen? Because they expect it to be an app or it's something to do on the computer, right? So it's always been the case of what you have at home is more modern than what you have at work, and the youth coming in will expect digital tools to be able to work from everywhere.

Ulrikke:

So if you don't have SharePoint in the cloud and you don't allow for young people to work from wherever they want, as a company you're kind of stuck in the old ways and you kind of need to keep up, and I think that's going to be one of those same things that actually we expect to be able to talk to an agent soon on all levels. So if you try to access something and it's not accessible through an agent experience or a chat experience, then you're just going to go well, too bad for you because I'm not going to use your services because it's not accessible to me, because we're not going to have that same way of working with things that we used to. Just a kind of a futuristic idea. I think that's where we're heading. Yeah Right, you had a few other posts here that I haven't been looked into.

Nick:

Yeah, I'll just touch on them briefly because it does tie into everything we're talking about. So there's an article from julie cosamaro, who's she's on the microsoft team, about the dataverse mcp server. So we've already talked a little bit about this and it ties into agents and accessing. So this is, if you're not sure what the dataverse mcp server is, this is an excellent article that walks you through what it is, what it can do, talks about a few experiments I did bring up a few weeks ago. Daniel Lakowicz has done some labs on the Dataverse MCP server. I would recommend everybody just run through those quickly it shouldn't even take you that long and that gives you a good understanding of what this can do. So that's something to check out, or what Dataverse MCP server really means. Also, there's another article.

Nick:

A quick shout out to Sean Astrakhan, who does the Solution Architect Accelerator course, which I went through with Sean a couple months ago. It was amazing a lot of great content. I've been doing this for a long time but of course you always learn new things and new perspectives. But he released a video on YouTube about Dataverse the ultimate data models guide, talking about ERD diagrams and things like that and building, you know, dataverse or data infrastructures. Despite the fact we have all these tools and he talks about them built within the Power Platform like a plan designer, whatever, and it will create an ERD for you. It doesn't always do the best job and it is something that you really need to think through. So he gives an excellent overview of how all this works.

Nick:

I think Hudeng and a few others have posted things on Dataverse and different relationships and stuff. So if you're getting new to Dataverse there's been a lot of content lately. I think, regardless of agents and AI and co-pilots and power pages if you solidify your Dataverse knowledge, especially now more than ever, it's just going to benefit you hugely in your career in the power platform and beyond, because I see Dataverse becoming a data source for a lot of applications and, with something with the Dataverse MCP server, this opens the door for you to build applications in your own favorite tools and platforms. Yet still talk to Dataverse.

Ulrikke:

So it's turning out to be the center of everything of our universe, so to speak. Yeah, and I absolutely 100% agree. I listened to a podcast today where they talked about research being done with people. They had a study with 54 people where they had some of them could not use any tools, some of them could use Google but had to write themselves, and some had access to ChatGPT and then they asked them to write a short story and then they tested them afterwards and the people that used ChatGPT couldn't really actually tell the people studying them kind of any exact sentences or what that story was about. People using Google and wrote to themselves could easily tell back what the story was about without the tools accessible to them. And then they tested them over the course of four months and what turned out was that the people that had access to AI tools and used that extensively, they lost the ability to create those stories to the quality that they had in the past. So they would kind of rate the stories and they deteriorated so quickly and also to the point where, when humans read through the stories they created, they said that they felt cold and distance and non-human, which then was actually rated by human at the end um and also that. And then they, they analyzed the stories and they actually adopted an ai llm way of writing which tells you something about the deterioration of the human mind. Because the human mind and human body is designed to be efficient If you're not using something, like you know, with muscle weight, weight training is very much a fresh commodity.

Ulrikke:

If you don't do it, it disappears. If the body thinks it doesn't need it, it removes it over time. If you don't train that muscle, then it will disappear. This goes for ERD diagram science as well. If you never, if you stop designing your data models today, it's not going to be long until you can't really do it right and you're going to forget about all the small details that you now, today, know how to do.

Ulrikke:

And then the guy on the podcast said so what do we do to prevent this from happening? And I said it's a simple answer you can take the elevator every single day or you can take the stairs. It's your choice. I choose to take the elevator. Sometimes, when I'm tired, when I'm stressed, when I'm carrying a lot of weight or when I'm short on time, I take the elevator, but usually I take the stairs.

Ulrikke:

And so meaning to say do the work, and do the work every day and keep your mind at the level, the quality that it is today, when you need to, when it's beneficial for you to be more, when you absolutely need to use AI to shortcut, to make things faster. But if you are starting to use it because you need better quality of work, then you're cheating your own mind. You're not cheating us, but you're cheating your own mind. So I just wanted to share that to kind of give a bit of context into what this is supposed to be. It is not supposed to replace us, um, it's supposed to make us more efficient, um, and if you let it replace you, then you're replacing yourself.

Nick:

Yeah, so yeah, yeah, no right, wow yeah, um, yeah, I, that's very powerful, it's. It's um, yeah, it kind of triggered something about my daughter actually had a saying when we were going to like I mentioned earlier, going to these concerts, we took the train because it was just so much easier and going up a set of stairs of course a lot of people were taking the escalator and it was just faster to take the stairs and my daughter said something really stuck with me. She said 10% of people will not take the stairs. Let's be the 10%. I'm like okay, love it. Yes, be the 10%. Be the 10%. I'm like okay, love it.

Ulrikke:

Yes.

Nick:

Be the 10%.

Ulrikke:

Be the 10%. So right, all right, let's go quickly through the rest of the news, because we just dive into these things, don't we? I wanted to shout out to a, a friend of mine in the new agent community, david, really, uh, he is now um created a tool called the pcf cli proxy tool, and this is how it works. It is a proxy that intercepts the requests to the bundle js and then the request is rerouted to your local dev server. It opens up in chrome with your crm and your latest code runs in CRM. So it's a way to trick while you are working on developing your PCF component. It will trick the system to think that you're connected to data as a proxy in between while you're working. That's how I read it, and if it's completely wrong, then, david, please tell me off. But I think that's what it is. Then, david, please tell me off, but I think that's what it is.

Ulrikke:

And then I came across something called Tell PCF Stories by Betim Beya, which is a storybook. It's a front-end workshop for building AI components and pages in isolation. It helps you develop hard-to-reach statuses and edge cases without needing to run the whole app. You can read more about Storybook in the official website, so we'll put links to that in the show notes if that is something that you need to dive more into.

Nick:

Do you have any other small?

Ulrikke:

little nuggets to share.

Nick:

No, no, I mean, that's a very common. It's a common pattern when creating javascript and model driven apps to there is a way to use to use fiddler to redirect, so you don't have to keep uploading and going through that whole process. So this is, this is great. Um, like, yeah, pcf controls are one of those things that keep meaning to get more more learning about, but uh, now that you're diving into react.

Ulrikke:

It's going to be a piece of cake.

Nick:

Yes, absolutely, let's hope so Cool, all right, moving along.

Ulrikke:

Right, okay, just saw something last week. Do you remember when Christine Kolonis had her? I think one of her first Power Apps was how to calculate how much time a Power App no, sorry, power Automate saves you, how much money it saves you. No, she had it, it was meetings.

Nick:

No, no, power Automate saves you. How much money it saves you? No, she had it, it was meetings. No, no, no, it was something in a meeting invite which calculated how much money that meeting cost.

Ulrikke:

That's probably two years ago Now in Power Automate. One of these days this week, something new popped up. It was Savings it's called. It was in preview. I was was like, would you like to enable savings? I'm like, what is this? It's a way for you to. If you turn on savings for all your power on my flows, then you give it some parameters in terms of how much manual time would this take. You uh, and then uh, you know every time it runs. And then yeah, how many, what? And then it will calculate how much money you've saved or how, uh, much time you saved across all the group or on-main flows. I love it. It's so much fun. It's one of the things I just want to enable immediately at our customers. We have to talk about it when we get back after summer. It's like onboarding flow. How much time does it take usually to onboard something?

Nick:

And then yeah, yeah, every time that runs that's, that's awesome, that'd be so good, especially like people like oh wow, the licensing is so like look how much money you've saved. Like check this out you know, easy yep.

Nick:

I think maybe that's where it's coming from all, right now you um, you put it there. You put the pointed out here the building modern single page applications and PowerPages preview. We have talked about this before. I started to play a little bit with it. I actually installed the sample code and played with that a bit this week and it's yeah, I think this is again more to report on this, but this is going to be a bit of a game changer in terms of how an option to build PowerPages, like with React sites and things like that. So I tried the credit card app. You can get it on GitHub. But, yeah, neeraj posted the blog post kind of explaining all of this stuff too, sort of what that all means. So, yeah, this was actually your article. Do you have your thoughts on this?

Ulrikke:

No, I think actually it's one of those things that just has floated in from one of our old notes kind of things, but it's, it's yeah, no, no, you're absolutely right. Just keep in mind that those example, those templates, they aren't really connected to data. So the data you're playing around with you think it's real, it's actually hard coded into the, into the app. So in those terms it's not really best practice, but it's done. It's actually hard coded into the, into the app. So in those terms it's not really best practice and but it's done to kind of to help you see how it can work. Um, just kind of as a a bit of a heads up for people because it looks amazing.

Nick:

And then to actually hard code it yeah, well, the same, yeah, this well, the sample I've used actually did actually talk to dataverse tables. Um, you, actually you load a solution and the solution has the tables there, so they're the credit card applications and stuff. And then I was able to go back and and yeah, it's in the, it's hard coded, hard coded in the code in the sense of the table names and everything. But I was able to go into the dataverse and see the data created from my sample site. So maybe I think these things like the you look at the, the log, these things are are constantly being updated. So maybe a previous example was just still static data.

Ulrikke:

I don't know, but yeah, it's coming along it's one of those things that, in terms of um, when you're developing um, it's kind of hard because you're not connected to it with the real data which ties into the things that we just talked about.

Ulrikke:

So there are ways to to go around it. Um, yeah, let's just uh move quickly on to. I saw something we talked about during the release wave episode how can you contribute, how can you help kind of give back? And then suddenly I saw on a link. It was called Contribute to Power Platform and Copa Studio Architecture Center, which is a way to actually give feedback and to help move these things along To contribute to a new article on the Power Platform and Copa Studio Architectural Guide. You can register your work and submit new GitHub issue and contribute to a pattern to the Architecture Center. So they have some word templates and they really want to kind of get feedback and for us to reach out and contribute. So we're going to put the link in the show notes for that. Excellent.

Nick:

If you want to have your name listed as a contributor in, like Microsoft Learn, which my name still spattered because I was an employee there, but that's one way and, speaking, that could also be if you're an aspiring or current Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, which we both are, and still we both got renewed. Yes, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. This is another way to contribute. So, but yeah, but if you have like, even if you just have random idea or not ideas, but things to contribute, this is a way to give the feedback to Microsoft. They are listening. There's different channels to make that happen.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, absolutely Okay. Let's just wrap it up with a little bit of a shout out that I really love, Unless you have something else you want to mention before we close off, go for it.

Ulrikke:

I saw Johannes Enstrom, which is a Swede, I guess he which is sweet, I guess. He listed a few of podcasts that keeps him inspired in the low-code space, and then he listed our podcast at the top, which I really appreciated. So I want to say thank you for that. And then he also listed a few others that I wanted to mention Go Down on Low-Code with Rob Kopolwicz and Ryan Duggan I should have practiced those names A low-code approach, which we have talked about before. And then, of course, CRM Rocks with Marcus Ellenson, which have both been guests on and he's been going, for this has been his since 2013. So I mean, it's just a staple podcast in our community and he still keeps going. It's just a staple podcast in our community and he still keeps going. It's amazing. So a bit of shout out to both Johannes and all the other podcasts out there that keep everyone up to date on the latest news for Power Platform. So that's very good. Hello, Code. Yes.

Nick:

Cool, all right. So basically, yeah, I think we're not going to. I think, in terms of the events, yes, we're. You know we're going to be participating in all those and that's where you get your rubber duck. The only one I want to shout out is, if you're going to register for the Power Platform Community Conference in Las Vegas, use BOOST100 to get $100 discount to that off your ticket. But love to see you there and get your rubber duck from us. Still have a big box full that I'll be dragging with me and yeah, and then our next episode. We're still trying to adjust for our summer schedule and things like that, so we'll still be. I think you just watch the socials, we'll let you know, but it will be on a Wednesday, either the 6th of August or the following week. At this point we haven't quite solidified that just because vacations and summer and you guys got a bonus episode from us last week, so I don't want to hear any complaints.

Ulrikke:

I think it's all good. Have a fantastic rest of your summer, guys, and we'll catch you when we catch you. Bye-bye, bye.

Nick:

Thank you for listening. No-transcript.

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Nick Doelman

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Ulrikke Akerbæk

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