Power Platform Boost Podcast

Preview Purgatory (#65)

• Season 1 • Episode 65

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Ulrikke:

right now, which is still in preview. I learned this week Because you had a chat with Microsoft as well. They're like, yeah, you know, it's still preview, right, and I'm like okay, so when's GA? They're like we don't know. Okay, so what's the pricing going to be? They're like we don't know. So I'm like okay, so where in the platform is this going to land? And they're like so there's really no it Full throttle pedal to the metal, just go for it. And then you start asking questions and no one really knows anything.

Nick:

But it's too bad because there's so much value source of news and updates from the world of the Power Platform and the Microsoft community with your Nick Doelman, and Ulrikke Akerbæk.

Ulrikke:

Hey Nick, How's it going?

Nick:

Good Ulrikke. How are you doing?

Ulrikke:

I'm great, thanks. I just had a fantastic weekend. A wedding One of my best friends got married at her kind of I don't know her farm, you call it that Neat. Yeah, so you have that idea of an idyllic outdoor summer wedding thing where all the kids just roam around and play in the grass and have fun and all of us get to sit and just enjoy the best food. And it all just checked out. So that was, yeah, freaking fantastic.

Nick:

Yeah, yeah, so that's always so dependent on the weather. I think one of my wife's cousins had a wedding like that last year, the year before or something, and it was great, like outside, like they actually had the dinner in their barn, like their shed kind of thing, and just in case it rained, but it didn't and yeah. So, yeah, those are the best as opposed to a big stuffy building sometime or a church or whatever. Like big stuffy building sometime or a church or whatever, like not to say they aren't beautiful. I was married in a big, beautiful church, but the outdoor weddings are are pretty cool too, so that sounds amazing.

Ulrikke:

Fantastic. How was your weekend?

Nick:

It was good we we met up with my wife's brother and his family, and it was because it was they were camping not too far away, so we went and visited and because of the just because here, we're in a bit of a heat wave in this part of Canada right now, so we didn't want to spend a ton of time outside, so we went to this exhibition, or whatever, put on by Hydro-Québec. So for those of you who live in Quebec probably know who Hydro-Québec is. Quebec is well known for its electricity generation, with a lot of hydroelectric and those types of things. So it was an exhibition about how electricity worked.

Nick:

It was great for the kids, lots of hands-on things to do, little games. Of course they had electric eels that were lighting up lights and everything. And of course I'm sure you've all seen the little thing where you put your hand on the metal ball and your hair goes six straight up. So my daughter did that and of course all the other kids did that. Of course their hair was sticking straight up, kind of thing, and I'm just sort of there laughing going this is how I lost all of my hair.

Nick:

So just be careful. And then you did it and nothing happens. Yeah, no, no, I funny, so but yeah, it was good. It was definitely a good weekend and we've been. We've been because we had our regular episode, that we had the release plan episode. We had like two or three episodes jammed up, so we gave ourselves a little bit of a break. So we're now starting on our new biweekly schedule. So we're back at it. And did anything happen in the world of our communities or in the Power Platform?

Ulrikke:

No, nothing really, so let's just talk about weather for 30 minutes.

Ulrikke:

No, of course so much happened and we've also had a bit of a discussion this summer about our cadence and what to cover, what not to cover. We keep coming back to this and we've never really solidified anything about this podcast from our perspective and I think everything's still up in the air. But we're going to keep going with a bi-weekly. We dabbled about the weekly but the bi-weekly is going to stick to that. But I think also we're going to kind of merge or talk more broadly to the Microsoft stack than just the Power Platform going forwards and it's going to be more AI boost and we're dabbling with names. If anyone had any suggestions, let us know. But it's going to be more of an AI and code black focus going forward, I think.

Nick:

Yeah, because I think this is the way Microsoft is going as well, just based on how their organization's being restructured, even internally, in terms of how everything's flowing as well. But all that being said, I do before we dive into the technical stuff, there's two things that more on the community side that I do want to touch on. First one, about Stuart Baxter and David Davidson. Now, stuart, I met a couple of years ago at Scottish Summit very briefly so I don't really know him super well, but they posted something that just hit me like a ton of bricks. What they're doing is they're getting a four-wheel drive vehicle and Stuart and David are driving from the UK to Kiev to deliver this vehicle for the Ukrainian people, for relief efforts and whatever else. But of course they're not just picking up their own pickup truck and going. Of course it takes donations and money to do this.

Nick:

So we put a link in here for their tour, I guess, supporting Stuart and David's mission to buy, drive and deliver an evacuation vehicle to Ukraine, so helping people, evacuate and everything. So we don't need to go into the politics or what's. Everybody knows what's going on in Ukraine a horrible situation. You and I, we have friends in Ukraine that are experiencing things on a day-to-day basis that just we can't even fathom. So anyways, we are going to put the link in. I'm sure Stuart and David would definitely appreciate your support on this. They're trying to raise 7,000 pounds. They're up to 859 this morning, so they still have a ways to go, but I think if the community can get behind them, that'd be really cool.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, 100%. Such a good initiative and also a dangerous one, putting their own lives on the line, because it's not. It is a real war. People are killed and it's not safe necessarily to do what they're doing, so they're really putting a lot on the line for this. Yeah, I'd love to see that initiative for sure. And I guess the other thing you wanted to highlight was something completely different, which is the new calendar, new Power Calendar coming up.

Nick:

Yeah, the Power Academy calendar, the new calendar, new Power Calendar coming up. Yeah, the Power Academy Calendar. Howdang and Jon have put this together, I think kind of as a was, as a need, where, you know, is there a centralized spot for all the community events? And I think there's been a few attempts at doing this, varying successes over the years. So these guys are putting it together. It is a work in progress.

Nick:

We could say public preview maybe is the best way to describe it. It is a work in progress. We could say public preview maybe is the best way to describe it and it's a place where the hope is that you could go in and find out all the community events that surround, like Microsoft and Power Platform and probably a little bit beyond. You know, in terms of having to rate, like some of them are for profit, but some of them aren't just to raise money, and it's a great place to me, the community. You learn so much and this is where you interact with the network. So, check out the link and provide them feedback and if you have an event that kind of fits the criteria, yeah, definitely put it in the you're able to kind of add it to the list. And yeah, good luck guys with this I. And yeah, good luck guys with this I. You know, I'm really hoping this takes off and becomes the hub for all the community events.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, 100%, and we're in a little group as well to help them get some feedback. And if you want to help contribute to something like this, I know they're looking into partnerships and sponsorships and I know there's a few mentor programs who want to get involved and you can sign up to get involved and you can sign up to say which events you're going to and you can filter and sort and do all the things you want to define the events that you're going to. So if you know of an event that isn't here, make sure to register. Like Nick said and I see that there's a Canadian event popping up here. I just randomly sort of filtered for co-pilot and I saw that Canadian Power Platform Summit is coming up in March.

Nick:

Yep, the call for submissions is coming up the end of August, so a few weeks and of course we are pestering our sponsors or pestering, sorry. We're engaging with our sponsors right now to ensure. But if you definitely want to either if you want to speak or you want to sponsor go to the website. We'll have the link in there. Check that out Now. I don't know, there's another going to be a bit of a surprise All of this another I would say a companion event happening on the Friday. So I don't want to steal that group's thunder, but we're collaborating with another group, so keep your eyes and ears open for that one as well. So it's going to be a super fun business applications weekend Interesting.

Ulrikke:

So that will be the weekend before MVP Summit in the Vancouver area for those of you who are in that region.

Nick:

So yeah, or traveling through to the MVP Summit, and from what I heard, sean will have the MVP party bus again, so that's an option.

Ulrikke:

Crossing the border with that bus. I talked to George about it and I was just like okay, so there's 21 nationalities here, good luck, fantastic, all right. It says a lot about our community, I think, and I love it.

Nick:

Yes.

Ulrikke:

So actually, so the first kind of news and update thing on our list is something you put in here which is a Copa mode in Edge, and I looked into this and this is for personal you have. This is for your personal account, right? Yeah, yeah.

Nick:

Yeah, and it's, it's. It's something I think is one of these things I saw and I was able to go on be able to it actually activated on my edge. It is a free service for now but from my understanding it will eventually be a paid thing. But the idea there is is you can, you know, open up multiple tabs and could do a lot more kind of co-pilot interaction with your links and web, your web browsing, things like that. So kind of the example they gave.

Nick:

If you I think we've all done this where we've had multiple flight sites opened up in multiple tabs and we're trying to flip back and compare and contrast, well, you could do that in Copilot, will sort of assist you with that and actually do some of that with you know, surfing for you. Now, a lot of this sort of again it's. There's other things that could do similar things, like the chat, gpt agents and all that kind of fun stuff. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes and what the feedback is. To be honest, I haven't played. I meant to go in and experiment a little bit with this but just haven't really dove into it just because there's a bazillion other things going on. But we'll put the link in. You can check out the blog and you'll see if something, if it applies to you and you have a really good use case, definitely get back to us. I'd be interested to hear about it.

Ulrikke:

Sounds like it. It seems like, from what I can read, that it kind of takes over your whole browser and it kind of keeps everything in context, which is fantastic. So, yeah, smart, all right. Other AI stuff and this is a never ending list. I think we can safely say something by Louise Freese kind of drew your attention to this, but it's something both of us really really subscribe to the AI Manifesto.

Nick:

Yes, it is a web page and guiding responsible AI and the development and collaboration and it's really cool, like check it out. It's basically it's about kind of like the hacker manifesto or some of these other manifestos we've seen and sort of the technology, the community, and they really talk about the five principles. So check out the link, you can kind of sign up and get a badge and things. But the five principles never let an LLM speak for you, never let an LLM think for you, never let an LLM own your work, never let an LLM own your work, never let an LLM replace your curiosity I think that's very important and never let an LLM discourage someone else. So these are sort of the five principles. It goes into greater detail. You can check that out, but that really kind of spoke to me, especially now over the last couple months.

Nick:

We're diving into AI. We're doing a lot of amazing things. I see a lot of opportunity using AI. I've been using it on my day-to-day basis. I rebuilt my whole website and a lot of the content was me working with Copilot. But I like to think a lot of the things of letting an LLM speak for you, like not letting it generate the content. It was basically me, but letting Copilot help refine that a little bit.

Nick:

And about replacing your curiosity. I'm really finding that LLM is enhancing curiosity for me but not letting replace it. Like yes, we can learn, but use it as a partner to learn as well, and not replace that curiosity and better to enhance it. So little side story, and I know we go down these rabbit holes and I apologize, but talk about curiosity.

Nick:

My wife asks a lot of questions and you know which is really good, and we're watching the news and they're talking about Alaska because there's some stuff happening there and about fact it was once owned by Russia but then now it's now a US state. Like how did that happen? And I'm like I really don't know. So I use chat GPT and says tell me about Alaska and gave me the whole history and we both learned something about that. And what's the difference between a territory and a state? What's the difference between a territory and province? Being curious and using an AI service really helps you get those fast answers and gives you context and kind of fuels that curiosity. So I like that. It said never let LLM replace your curiosity, taking it back home. Check out the AI manifesto. Check out the five principles.

Ulrikke:

See what you think, let us know what you think about that, if this is something you'd adhere to as well. Yeah, 100%, and I have the same experience, and living with small kids is always a treat, because they ask a bazillion questions and it's never related, and I don't just things I would never even cross my mind to ask. They're suddenly out of the blue. There's a question, and there's always. It's not always, and it's an opportunity to learn together. So my youngest, he's seven. He just discovered the voice with ChatDBT and he just asked me one question and I and I and I showed him how it works and he just grabbed my phone and went off with it and I was like, okay, catch you later. So he loves it. Um. And now it's getting even better with the, the introduction of chat dbt5, which surprisingly just showed up in platform first.

Nick:

Um really for a lot of people, almost almost immediately, like we knew it was coming, and then all of a sudden it's like, oh yeah, well, this, this is going to show up in Copilot Studio in the next few weeks or a couple of months, or some of our other tools that we're going to be talking about, but it was like instantaneously. Now, of course, that helps that Microsoft is a big investor in open AI, so they probably were, probably were given a little bit of a preview to this.

Ulrikke:

Probably were given a little bit of a preview to this Yep and they flipped the news, but yeah, it's interesting.

Nick:

So if you look at your LinkedIn feeds, like mine probably exploded with all the GPT-5 announcements and things like that, and I'm finding the big thing that I like about it is something I know I didn't struggle with. But a question was okay, which model should I be using? So a lot of the work I've been doing and trying to revamp my own business and work in content okay, should I be using this model for this or this model when I'm developing code? Which model should I use there? Or even, which LLM should I be using which works best for what I'm working with?

Nick:

Gpt-5 sort of takes that understands, tries to extract the context to where you're coming from and then basically chooses the right model context for that, which, in theory, sounds good. But I also wonder if your prompting isn't great, is it going to make sure, like, is it going to understand enough? And this is, I think, still to remain to be seen. So, yeah, exciting times. I mean things are changing on a day-to-day basis. We've been off three weeks and I'm just looking at this list of all the new stuff and things have changed.

Ulrikke:

It's crazy, yeah, and it's quicker, it's faster and it's more reliable and also it flips between deep research and deep learning and more superficial things automatically. It can also hold a bigger context and it can also hold a bigger conversation, and does that better than the previous versions have in the past. It also has new kind of coding skills, so it's better for all. It's better, it seems like it's better for all the things that we needed for and not just uh, rewriting emails and stuff. So, uh, yeah, that's, uh, it's very good and and, as we said, it is also available in Power Platform so you can use it with all the used chat GPT-5 in no GPT-5, the model and when you're working with Power Platform, which is a nice bridge over to the next items on the list, where we have a few news and updates related to Power Platform specifically.

Nick:

Yep. So the first one there is Co-Pilot Studio Flows by George Tanzini. Again, it was a LinkedIn post basically breaking down sort of the differences between Power Automate flows and agent flows. I found this is a really good article because there's a lot of confusion of not just what they are, when would you use one versus the other. So again, this helps about you know extracting what the difference is. You know how they work and things like that. Again I know we've talked about this before help you decide on when, what tool to use at the right time, although I think in the grand scheme of things, these are getting more emerging, more and more. But right now sometimes we have to make those decisions on those toolings. So thanks, george, for that particular post. I found that very helpful.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, me too, and I also like the fact that he's on the far end. He's kind of summarizing what you need to check to know what to use what, and also he takes into account the licensing model, which is also something that I saw in a post and video by Damien Byrd this week where he talks about agent flows and the evolution of them and also how you need to be aware of the pricing.

Ulrikke:

So he says that agent flows they charge a little bit differently than Power Automate flows and it's based on the API calls that you do and he says so 100 API calls equal 13 messages, which translates into $0.13. So in real money. So it's kind of a different. And so it says if you kind of were, if you, if having efficient flows were important in the past, it's never been more important than now because of this licensing model, efficiencies, everything, as you really need to streamline your flows.

Nick:

This again, I'm going to show my age, but this goes back to, like you know, the 70s and 80s, where you needed to write efficient code because you only had so much memory on your computer chips. And now here we are. I mean, I think always should be efficient, like definitely in terms of what your cost is. But I think also and this is something I don't really want to talk too much about, but something that's beginning to arise is the actual energy and environmental impact of all of this stuff at the end of the day. You know running. You know running.

Nick:

Creating images takes you know, cycles, which consumes power which comes from the earth one way or the other. So again, can you tell I just went to a hydroelectric exhibition. Yeah, yeah.

Ulrikke:

It is a huge discussion and the environmental impact is huge. So, yeah, but that's a conversation for another day. I think that's a conversation for another day. I think, yes.

Ulrikke:

Someone else who is frequently posting about co-pilots is Femke Cornelissen, which we've talked about a number of times on this podcast, and she published a book. This book, it would be a leaflet, is what I would call it in the past but now suddenly it's a book. She published it in Dutch and in English and it's about Copilot without a license. So it's the personal Copilot chat that you have on your computer. It comes with your Microsoft 365 license. It's free for everyone to use. It's the private account kind of Copilot and she goes through all the things you can do with it. She has a collection of interesting prompts and what you can do with attachments and different resources, and it's I think it's a 25 pages long thing and you have to provide your email account and you can download the book. So that's a very good resource, and I'm sure 90% is AI created, but doesn't mean it's not providing any value. So it means you can get pretty far ahead in using these tools for free, which is very important to a lot of people. And then talking about kind of getting guidance on co-pilots and AI, I saw a video that I just have to mention.

Ulrikke:

It was by Damian Robinson. It was top five mistakes when using Copilot Studio. I think he's a Microsoft employee, if I'm not mistaken. So this is a very short video and it seems like it's one of the first ones that he's done in that kind of video format. Seems like he's more of a blogger or something, but this is very short and very to the point, concise Five major things that he sees when he's evaluating Coppola Studio agents and charts, which one of them is kind of thinking of knowledge as ingested, so a RAG model with its retrieval, augmented generation kind of model.

Ulrikke:

Well, you would think that it's ingesting the knowledge you upload to it. So you give an agent access to knowledge, you think it's kind of consuming all of it, but it's not. It is simply just giving you snippets and it's indexing based on your prompts and what you're then doing with those knowledge sources. And that's a very common pattern, common to think that you just give it access to a lot of knowledge and documents, then it's all knowing about that content and those resources. But it's not. So that's one of the things that he's highlighting in his video, and there's four more of those smart tips and tricks, so very worth your while to check out.

Nick:

Cool. So the other big thing you know, along with GPT-5, is this thing called generative pages, and we've seen videos from Scott, we've seen stuff from Diana, of course, a big blog post by Ryan, so we have a ton of little links in here about generative pages, which is really cool. Have you tried generative pages yet?

Ulrikke:

No, I haven't, I haven't doubled into it, but so it's kind of. We talked about this a little bit. So you, because there's multiple stages of this, which scott, also jiro, covers in his video. So there's a two step is part one is the vibe coding with the code apps. So that's when you start with code and you use ai as a coding buddy, so to speak, but it's code first kind of approach, whereas I find generative pages is the other way around. It's when you start with a prompt and you just prompt your way to an app, in a sense yeah, well, yeah.

Nick:

Yeah, I think that the two differences that I see the code apps from Scott's video is there. Where we're building this is like a whole new app category in a sense, but we're using the AI-assisted Vibe coding. To me, I don't know, I know a few weeks ago I was a big fan of the term vibe coding. I'm getting more into, like I saw, ai-assistive app generation, but maybe that's just me, because to me it's like blindly creating an app is one thing, but I think we need to I don't know nurture it or work with it to generate all this. But sorry, let me go back. So the code apps themselves are, like I said, a whole other app. So you're building almost the entire app and that will be your Power App, but it's all code generated and I think it does React. But also I thought it could do Angular and Vue as well, but maybe I'm thinking PowerPages, spas. But anyways, the whole idea and of course this empowers makers who might not be developers to be able to build kind of pro-code apps by going through that process Generative Pages is almost like within an existing model-driven app.

Nick:

So within the model-driven app you already have your views, your forms, your dashboards and then your custom pages. But now this is almost like the next evolution of custom pages where, okay, I want to actually have a view within my model-driven app and that's where I see generative pages going. So, for example, I did an experiment where I said you know the hierarchical view, which is something that got deprecated because it only could do one thing. I said can you give me a hierarchical view, which is something that got deprecated because it only could do one thing? I said can you give me a hierarchical view of accounts and contacts together in a single page and view? And it generated a not perfect but a fairly good working representation of that data within the context of my model-driven app.

Nick:

So I haven't dove in too much into code apps yet. I think it's still private preview, like they're out there. They're demoing it, but I'm not sure if it's accessible to everyone yet. Maybe it is, but generative pages definitely is in public preview. So you should be able to try that on your dev environment please, not your production.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, yeah, and I think it's still US only. I think that's what it says on the button which then gives you that the window that you see from plan designer allows you to put in different prompts. There are different preset prompts already. That allows you to put stuff in there. And so, from Diana, what Diana Birkelbach is doing is she's showing you and going through it within the blog post format, detailed, step by step, all the buttons she's pushing, all the things that she's putting in there and everything that it produces, and she's also looking into the code, line by line, section by section, digesting, you know, pulling it apart, which is great. It is using the material UI out of the box, but I think what Scott was showing was how he switched it to using Fluent UI 9, which is more of a modern interface, which makes it look a lot cooler. So there's things you can do.

Ulrikke:

So what we'll also do is we'll put links to the two videos that Scott did last week and the week before, where one is the vibe coding part, two generative pages, how he kind of created. I think that is the um, the checkout, the old frumpy, horrible device checkout app that you get as a, as a template and then also using vibe code to code first code app, which is a completely different um way of working with it. It it's when you start with it's like single page applications with power pages really, because you start in Visual Studio, you have to use the PAC CLI. You look at the code and the code is kind of what it is that you're creating, and then you build it and then you publish it to your environment afterwards. It's just two very different approaches and that is React-based, as you said.

Ulrikke:

So very cool and I also saw. So one of the last things I think that Scott said in one of his videos is that yeah, next video I'll do vibe coding in PowerPages. I hope that is single page applications because it's like it's from the release. So that's kind of the three big things now is just what we said. The three big things now is just what we said generative pages, code apps and then single page applications, or bring your own code for power pages.

Nick:

I can't wait to see that I'm very curious to see if all of these because it's all merging together all of this stuff to see how this incorporates with plan designer. Like and not to toot my own horn, but I did a, I did a video on plan designer this week and I went through and played with a bunch of stuff and now Plan Designer still is going out and generating sort of those traditional apps. But I wonder if the next evolution will be going into more of these code apps kind of thing and Plan Designer being that hub where you're beginning to build out your almost your pro code solution but doing it through a maker's lens kind of thing. So again, I'm just speculating. I don't know. I just know what is there right now.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, and you look at that and then you know that with PowerPages, like we talked about last time, that they're merging kind of the system, user and the contact records and the web roles and the security roles, so you kind of see all of it merging and kind of playing well together.

Ulrikke:

And then you have the bring your own coaches as you start with in Visual Studio as well. I completely agree and I don't think that there's any reason why you should, kind of. And also the conversation about it's cheaper to build a PowerPages site than to build a model-driven app for all of your users internal users, because it means they don't have to have a premium license and it kind of ties into that whole story of why separate the two things, right, it's like so, or the three things for that matter.

Nick:

So yeah, I was going to segue into your next thing, because this is something I'm kicking myself. Here's why Because I did this video on Plan Designer and because I went through a whole process basically recreating a CRM system and, of course, in the data designer there I replaced the tables but I didn't realize I could have done that a step sooner. And the link that you showed from Eliza showed how to do that, or from Eliza or April, and I'm like darn, it was that there when I was playing with it. Did I totally miss that?

Ulrikke:

Because that was my question, because that's the Power Apps pulse and I think the advocacy team is doing such a good job and every month, just bringing up the news and updates and all this model and details that you might have missed in Power Apps specifically. And now, this time around, it was the way that you can finally replace the auto-suggested, auto-created one tables that it comes up with with your own, for instance, the contact table or whatever it is it creates. Employee, can you get it to not do that? It's impossible. You know, say specifically that I have a contact table, don't create it, still creates it, and then now you can actually go in and swap it around for your own.

Nick:

So yeah, yeah, like it's still the the common. It still doesn't know about the common data model. It seems like it's not smart enough to say maybe I should just use the contact table here. It's still up to you, but it also you know, yeah, it just makes it, but at least you can do it.

Ulrikke:

Now the earlier versions of plan designer, it's kind of like I want to use the contact table and it'd be like no or yeah, so now we can but I think that goes to show you know how sometimes we go into the dark places and we think, oh, I'm going to be replaced because you know ai can do anything. And then you look at how long it's taken microsoft to get that ai agent to understand the common data model and I go well, maybe I have a job still. I mean, if it's that hard to get it to actually understand what's already there, then yeah.

Nick:

Yeah, if anything I learned from that exercise because it was the video was way longer, the one I created was way longer than I thought it would be because it just go to show you still need that human, that solution, architecture in the loop and even the work I did previous to that in terms of building the, the product requirement document and all of those things, even before I hit plan designer, it's like you know you. So I think, yes, we can get there maybe a little bit faster, like the. I love the fact it does that tedious work for me. But oh, oh, man like to think that you can just go in and type and okay, and an app is going to magically appear. You're sadly mistaken. You still need to engage with your customers, plan this all out, you know, get the feedback, go through the loop. Yes, ai can help you build it and help you think about it. But yeah, I'm not. I'm I'm less worried about my job than I was maybe a month or two ago.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, yeah, and just you know the video, the top five mistakes. The second mistake that Devian is mentioning is too short of a topic description. And if you look at Scott's video, the manifest, I think he's calling it intro prompt or instructions or something, but it's massive, it's just so big and I think he shares it as well. But it goes into details about what React is. I mean, you have to tell it everything. So then I completely agree with you, it's all in the instructions, and we've said this since the beginning, but it's all in the prompt. And once you've kind of gotten it going, I feel it's safer to kind of be a little bit less descriptive in your prompts, because it kind of understands where you're going. But the first and the instructions, my God, that's important.

Nick:

Yep, for sure, yep yeah.

Ulrikke:

All right, so are you ready to shift gears and move on to no? Actually, there's a segue here to what you found on GitHub, the modern template repository for building single page applications.

Nick:

This is really cool. Basically, yeah. So of course, I'm in the process of learning this. I actually my whole summer plan which went off the rails pretty quickly was. I rebuilt my website and I thought I'm going to rebuild it as a single page application. I'm going to learn this because do-to-do and then once I started getting into it, I'm like okay, this is going to be a little bit more learning and a lot of things I want to do. So I ended up kind of, I would say, building my website using the classic way, but I was able to actually get Really.

Ulrikke:

You created that in PowerPages the way that you would a year ago.

Nick:

No, not a year ago. No, no, no, because I still used a lot of custom web templates and stuff. So I did, oh yeah, GitHub. Github Copilot was very prominent in me building that site.

Ulrikke:

Right. I'm not shaming you, I'm just. It's so interesting because we are talking about these things every other week and being, and then when you put it to the test, when you actually you go in you. If anyone could do this, it should be you, yes, and you actually resorted to doing it the old way and it's like.

Ulrikke:

I just need to be clear. I shaming, I'm just. It is important for people to understand that we rant about this and we go rah rah, drink the Kool-Aid, but then you put the metal to the pedal, the tithe to the test or whatever it's called, and it doesn't work.

Nick:

Yeah, yeah, so yeah, and you're not building a rocket ship.

Ulrikke:

You're building a personal brand company website.

Nick:

Yes, so this a rocket ship. You're building a personal brand company website. Yes, so this was sort of a yes, so maybe, and then maybe in six months from now I have much more of the confidence and the ability or the tooling itself to build that as a single page application. But for now it was a case of do it, do it the way I know. But that being said, this is something that I do believe that if you're working in power pages or even power platform in I think we talked about it with these code apps and the generative pages and, of course, single page applications, this is sort of the way things are shifting. So it's good, even from a developer point of view, to understand how these things work. But even from a maker point of view, you don't have to necessarily be a React expert, but at least have at least an idea what the code's being generated and how to prompt this. All that being said, there's an interesting it's on GitHub. It's called the PowerPages SPA Bot Starter or SPA Bot Starter, and what it is it's a modern template repository to build single page applications that deploy automatically to Microsoft PowerPages using GitHub Actions and the Power Platform CLI. So it basically has this template and kind of goes to the hello world, which I always like to start with and to help you learn and build single page applications and Power Pages, and also automate that process a little bit using GitHub.

Nick:

So we're going to put the link in the show notes. There's like source code and everything there. It's very. The documentation is very done well. It's laid out very good. It talks about what you need. I had hoped to be able to go through and set this up myself. I have set up the one from Microsoft, that example of single page application but I do want to go through this. So this is something I'll report back in a couple of weeks to kind of tell you how I fared out with this. But if you are building power pages and into building single page applications, definitely check this out. The ID tag is Milla Marie. It came from a LinkedIn post, so hopefully we can find the name of the person who wrote their full name so we can actually attribute to them properly, because I think this looks pretty cool and it's open source so you can contribute back.

Ulrikke:

Fantastic and, as always, you'll get the links in the show notes and also if you are inspired or not inspired, sorry, and you need inspiration of what you can do with Power Pages. You also found something that I'm going to show because I'm doing portal launch the day that this is released. This link is because this is always the question Show me real life examples of Power Pages is always the question. Show me real life examples of power pages is always the question, and we always go sorry, they're all behind authentication. Usually the use case for power pages is business website, right, it's always behind authentication. Also has to do with the licensing model. As soon as you have unauthenticated pages, you have to pay a different kind of license.

Nick:

But and I'll just hand it over to you but yeah, yeah, so this is by Raghavan Rajan and he's a MVP in New Zealand. I believe that's where he's located now and it's really cool because he just said a real world PowerPage is top public portals you could visit right now, because you're right. Okay, well, is anybody else using this? Like that's a question I've heard a bazillion times and it's like yes, is it enterprise-worthy.

Nick:

Yeah, yeah, so within Microsoft, like, there's a list with maybe I don't know, maybe I'm not allowed to say there is a list within Microsoft that has a list of sites, of course you know, but this one is something that they're all publicly facing. You can actually click on the link and you can go and you can see real world PowerPages sites. So he has top 10 here so you can check those out. If you're looking for an 11th one, you can look at my own personal site that I just created that's also using PowerPages.

Ulrikke:

Yep.

Nick:

Yep, so yeah, it is. Believe it or not, people are using PowerPages in the real world and for very successful, really cool use cases and it's just getting better, of course, with that, like we talked about the security merging and all the other the security agents they're adding and all the tools and stuff.

Ulrikke:

So there's a lot of investment happening in PowerPages or in the power platform in general, where PowerPages is affected or gets affected by it. Yeah, it's fantastic to see exploring real world PowerPages in the wild. So, yeah, it's fantastic to see Exploring real world Power Pages in the wild. So, yeah, go check that out. Just wrapping up with some general Power Pages stuff we, our good friend Anna Inez Urutia I need to practice her name because she says it with a we love Anna.

Nick:

Anna designed my new logo and she did an amazing job. Anyways, go on. I don't have any. We love Anna. Anna designed my new logo and she did an amazing job. Anyways, go on.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, she's fantastic, and she has a video on the Microsoft Reactor page which is an introduction to Project Sophia, which is something I've also ranted about a lot. So we have a lot of chats going on about that right now, which is still in preview. I learned this week Because we had a chat with microsoft as well. They're like yeah, you know it's still preview, right, I'm like, okay, so when's ga? Like we don't know. Okay, so what's the pricing going to be? They're like we don't know so. Okay, so we're in the platform, this is gonna land. That are like so there's really no, it's one of those things where it's this full throttle pedal to the just go, just go for it, and then you start asking questions and no one really knows anything.

Nick:

But it's too bad because there's so much value to it if it gets in the hands of companies 100%.

Ulrikke:

But also there's the thing where, so to speak, to Anna's video, what she does is it's an hour long video where she goes through and really, if you want to get started with it and you're a little bit unsure how it works or what kind of prompts to use or what to write or to use it for, this is the video done. It's so good and she talks about all the all the aspects of it. It's very sales oriented. Now there is talk about expanding that to other industries and areas, but we don't have that confirmed yet.

Ulrikke:

But the potential of project sofia because we have customers coming in, going, we have so much data and we want to create, we want to put it in fabric and we want to create our own models, but we don't have a way to get to know our data Then Project Sophia is perfect for that scenario because it's data first. It's not because if you want to create a report on top of data, you need to know your data first. You need to know what kind of information is in there already. But Project Sophia is a buddy to help you explore and get to know your data. As it stands right now. So as a, I can't believe that there's no, that there's not clear directions towards where it's going, and I love the and I see so much potential.

Nick:

Totally agreed.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, so that is that video. And also, just being on the Reactor kind of page, I don't, because you used to work at Microsoft Docs Do you have Microsoft Reactor to you? Is that something you're very familiar with? Is it me just not missing the ball on this one?

Nick:

Good question.

Ulrikke:

What is it?

Nick:

Let me ask chat GPT on this one.

Ulrikke:

Okay, so while you do that, because there's other events, right, so this was live and now you can watch the recording, but there are other things coming. So, 14th of August, there's an agent with purpose, gen AI meets Lego session things coming. So 14th of august, there's a agent with purpose, gen ai meets the lego session. Um, and and yeah, so, but I can't really place it in the so the reactor?

Nick:

to me there's. I think these are online events so anybody can sign up and view them, but physical offices either have or had something called the reactor, where it was a place where there would be short sessions, whatever you can do hands on. I know there was a reactor in Toronto and I know there's other places. I know there was something in Australia, but I think they're being shut down or revamped or something too. So without yeah, this is yeah, we let's. How about we we'll put a pin in that and we'll find out all about the reactor and talk about it next time. How's that?

Ulrikke:

Right, all right, let's put it in there for next time. Perfect. So any other news you wanted to touch on before we kind of wrap it up?

Nick:

The very quick one about the Power Platform CLI MCP server. This is by Albert Jan Schrot, abby, who we know in the community, and he wrote a really good article about the MCP server in the Power Platform CLI. Of course, mcp servers are another huge thing that's happening right now. Of course there's a Dataverse MCP server. I'm doing some online courses kind of stuff outside of Microsoft and they talk about MCP servers, about just a way that we can different agents can talk to different platforms, kind of like on a common api, a kind of a standardized way to interface with different things. So he wrote a very cool article about the power apps, cli, which of course we talked about earlier in terms of creating things, but also from an administration point of view. Um, I know a lot of administrators live and die by the pack cli so and we use it as well in PowerPages for many things. So great article on that from Abby. Appreciate it.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, great, all right. So with that, I think it's time to wrap it up. We have a few events coming up, like we usually do. You have DynamicsCon Regional in the Rocky Mountains in August you talked a little bit about that last time and then also we have the Power Platform Community High Five, which is online on September 2nd, where you talk about your fitness for IT professionals and I dive into Power Platform agents.

Nick:

I'm excited for that one so much fun.

Ulrikke:

Yeah, me too, and the rest you can find in the show notes.

Nick:

Yes, absolutely, and I'm actually doing an event at home in Ottawa. Fun, yeah, me too. All right, and the rest you can find in the show notes. Yes, absolutely, and I'm actually doing a an event at home in ottawa, believe it or not yeah, when is that?

Nick:

that's october 3rd. It's the microsoft 365 ottawa 2025. I'm doing, of course I'm talking about car pages, but it's in my actual home city, so it'll be. It's actually pretty cool. I've I've meant to speak at this event for like three years in a row and, pretty cool, I've I've meant to speak at this event for like three years in a row and every year I've always been traveling or something's been going on to the point and I thought they're not going to accept this session this year because they know I'm not going to be able to make it. But, uh, actually, yeah, the timing worked out. So I'm actually excited to be actually speaking at an event where I'm actually going to be like waking up and sleeping in my own bed that night, maybe.

Ulrikke:

Wow, you're the prodigal son. Finally, the star descends on the hometown public and they're going to be the band and the red carpet and the king and the band and everything. Oh, it's going to be so great?

Nick:

Not quite, but sure.

Ulrikke:

Fantastic In my head. It is All right, Okay with that. We're just rounding it off. Good chatting with you, as always, and I hope you guys feel like you've been updated on the news and updates for Power Platform. Thanks for listening and if you like 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, Ulrika Akerbeck and Nick Dahlman, and see you next time.

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