Power Platform Boost Podcast

Live-ish (#68)

• Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman • Season 1 • Episode 68

Share episode
Speaker 1:

No, I think I know what the podcast episode is going to be Ten times yeah. Okay.

Speaker 2:

Oh wow. And this one doesn't have a… or go live Live disaster.

Speaker 1:

Usually we cut these pieces out. Oh, that's right, sorry.

Speaker 2:

Editing.

Speaker 1:

Hello everyone and welcome to the Power Platform Boost podcast, your timely source of Power Platform news and updates, with your hosts Nick Dolman and Ulrike Ackerbeck. As that's what you're looking at now, is our brain scrambling to get ready to do a recording of the podcast.

Speaker 2:

Right, which we're also trying to do live on YouTube. We're trying to do live. I think that that's not happening, whether it's the internet or whatever. So I've actually we're just going to be recording so you will be able to go back later and watch this.

Speaker 1:

So I'm doing it, so that way, we can yeah, we can get going. We can get going, yes, all right. Usually this takes us about two hours to get done, and now we're trying to do it in 30 minutes and provide value for you guys. Uh, so we're gonna fail miserably and you're gonna be watching it live. How's's that? It's perfect.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, so, let's actually. Yeah, weather's great. Good, we talked about that Good. Kids are good. Vacation's good. How was your weekend? Weekend's good? Okay, good Because we have 30 minutes, because I have a mentoring session right after this. So we actually have. That's what we always should have. All right, let's dive into the news and updates that have happened in the world of the Power Platform in the last two weeks.

Speaker 1:

Yes, let's do that. Okay, so you guys are now at Nordic Summit and you've spent your whole day ramping up on all the new fancy stuff from all the wonderful speakers here, but also there's some things happening online. So you want to cover the first news item on the list, nick, because you can now see, this is usually what our setup is like when we report a podcast, right?

Speaker 2:

So you're seeing kind of the behind the scenes. We have a OneNote where we actually collect these news stories and look at the various newsletters like Power Platform Weekly and Power Platform Dev Weekly and some of these other ones. So this is something I saw from James. I should have the full name there, do I have? Yeah, james Ryan and he talked about getting started with Playwright for model-driven apps and now this is something. We saw a session in, I think, london in the spring. It was on Playwright and we thought, okay, for testing model-driven apps, this is something that we need to learn and get into. And James has actually started to put together a whole blog post on how to use Playwright and its architecture for testing model-driven apps. So, yeah, it looks really cool. He's got a lot of some code in here, a lot of interesting things, and it looks like he's things that are missing, and it looks like he's going to continue on with more of these blog posts.

Speaker 1:

So this is great because this is something that I think is both on your and my list is to learn how to do playwright and use that in our projects for testing. Yeah, and I'm wondering if we can now bring this in and use this for the other products in the platform as well, because you look at something like custom pages or code apps and the things we know. We can't go back and edit it. So what happens is you create something and you delete it. You throw it away again, right, right. So then testing becomes very important. Does this thing do what the other thing did that I just threw away? So testing is becoming more and more important, absolutely, yeah, it's good to get.

Speaker 2:

Right Cool.

Speaker 1:

Yes. So the next thing on the list is something which we all know is very potent these days and a lot of people like killing low-code. So Thomas Hanser, one of the organizers, is Thomas here.

Speaker 2:

No, no, okay, good, I told him not to come. Oh, perfect, okay, good, good enough.

Speaker 1:

No, no, we talked about his blog post last time, which got a lot of attention and comments, and now someone from the community that we talk about a lot, david Wyatt, has also posted will vibe coding kill low code? And he's actually flipping it around because his arguments are that the cost of AI and the credits is not in the favor of AI, and he does some simple calculations saying that, okay, you can compare what the runs will cost and also you think, oh, marshall's Law, yeah, it's going to be cheaper and cheaper. Well, if Microsoft's still not making money off Co-Pilot Studio, do you think it's going to be cheaper down the line? Maybe not. So if you're looking at something that could be a flow, it should be a flow still.

Speaker 1:

So what to use for different scenarios becomes very important when you look at it from a cost perspective and also the deterministic outcomes. Some things in your organization you can't leave up to the LLM. You simply need that deterministic outcome and you need to know what it's going to produce every single time and the consistency. That also means that in his mind that AI is not going to be just AI going forwards, and he also talks about security, especially with LLMs. This is a very interesting discussion and the technical debt, etc. So this is a very, very good blog post, not just from a thought leadership perspective, but also going into the details, and that's what David does. It's brilliant with that Going into the details, giving us the calculations, the math behind his reasoning. So a very good blog post if you want to check that out.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 1:

And then we had a name change.

Speaker 2:

No, really no. Microsoft changed the name what?

Speaker 1:

That never happens. Yeah, I know it's so strange, right? So does anyone remember? Yeah, of course it's on the screen, so now you all know. So we just picked one of the bazillion posts about this on LinkedIn because something changes a name. It's big news.

Speaker 2:

Oh, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1:

And then I thought, wow, okay, I need to. Yeah, okay, so what's going on then? And it's so underwhelming I almost fell asleep. It's like, okay, microsoft 365, copilot that we all know and love the chat is now Copilot Studio Lite. Yeah, yeah, that's the exact like. Hmm.

Speaker 2:

Yes exactly.

Speaker 1:

And then you have the Copilot Studio Lite Four. I know it's crazy, right? And the names actually have double quotes in them as well. I've never seen something this stupid in my life.

Speaker 2:

It's so ridiculous and I think again, like I when I worked at Microsoft, I actually went on a rant about name changes in one of these meetings with the marketing people going on. You don't realize the impact that a name change has. Like sure, on the, the websites, whatever, oh, it's now called co-pilot, studio light, big deal. But working in docs, that means you have to change a whole bunch of documentation around. Think of all the content that you folks out there you're creating for the community your youtube videos, your blog posts, all those things that now they're kind of terms that are out of date and interesting.

Speaker 2:

I was, uh, I got a message from lisa crosby so I think most of you know who Lisa Crosby is and I was like, oh, how's it going? And I don't know if I'm allowed to say but she's writing a book on Copilot, surprise, surprise. And she said literally there was about two days from sending it to the publisher before this name change came, so she had to go through her entire book and make sure the name changes were correct before it hit the publisher. So anyways, these are the types of big impacts that I've ranted about it to the Microsoft marketing team and kind of got the little pat on the head like they're there, it's fine, it's all right, it's a good thing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, they think, and I've started doing this. Megan Walker taught me this. When I create a blog post, I always make sure to have a thing at the top going this have a thing at the top going this was accurate at the time I wrote it. If something along these lines isn't correct anymore, it's not my fault.

Speaker 2:

Right. So yeah, name changes, We'll data flex our way around that one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, so there's other news as well. Yes, on the nitty-gritty details right, you talk about this usual locos that killed the thought leadership on the top, but then also we have people like Karsten Gross who will remind us that there are nitty-gritty detail changes as well that we need to be aware of. For example, that they have now expanded the tolerance for files that you can use with your agents, so now you can have up to 1,000 files and have it indexed out from SharePoint, for instance, or OneDrive. So it's the 5x the premium limits, and I'm surprised because it's all about 10x these things.

Speaker 1:

Oh, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, so I think a bit underwhelming again. Yes, oh no, I think I know what the podcast episode is going to be 10 times yeah. Right Okay, oh wow.

Speaker 2:

And this one doesn't have a… or or go live disaster. Usually we cut these pieces out. Oh, that's right, sorry, editing.

Speaker 1:

Live editing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

And also we have a few. We have this and then we have another post from someone's actually here and that's a bit interesting.

Speaker 1:

Oh, cool I know that Haurang and Jesus Christ. Now I'd find just my head crashed. He did a podcast about model-driven apps the ultimate cheat sheet, the things he wished he knew before he started working with model-driven apps and I've talked to people here today that discovered working with model-driven apps from a session here today and absolutely love it, and so for us who grew up with Dataverse, that's kind of a weird concept, but you have to realize more and more people are actually coming into our platform from Copilot, studio or from other products, and that's weird for us, but it's interesting and you need to kind of keep feeding them information as well. So this is a very good post by Hodang that I really like.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, hodang's a great guy. Like if anybody has met him. He's a super like very humble guy, but he's produces some really amazing content and just very strategic about it as well. Yeah, and again I saw this and like, oh yeah, here, here, here's Hodig showing off again this really cool thing that he made. So we love you.

Speaker 1:

And then I'm looking at, and then I'm looking at. Okay, so this is something that I put in here, that I wanted to pick your brains on, because you work with this. Oh, yes. I knew that this would excite you. So Louise Fries, which is in terms of thought leadership, is one of the big voices in our community, and usually she rants.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, a little bit yeah.

Speaker 1:

Like worse than we do, but this time actually, it was another kind of take on something. She is talking about how to work with data modeling through Mermaid, and I know that you worked with it, so did you see this post?

Speaker 2:

I saw the post and actually Louisa showed me this oh, actually about a month or two ago, as she was working on it because she said well, I know you worked with Dataverse and Mermaid before. Can I show you what I'm working on? And I'm like, well, sure, so we got on Teams and she walked me through and I gave her some feedback and everything, and at that time it was all command line based and so now she's actually has a front end to it, which she wrote with React as well, but it's great. So I don't know if you don't know what, if anybody who doesn't know what Mermaid is Mermaid is a kind of a diagramming language.

Speaker 2:

Since I discovered Mermaid, I don't use Visio anymore to write, to draw my ERDs, my enterprise relationship diagrams, which shows the relationships of your tables in a database or like for Dataverse, for example. So with Mermaid you can actually write a text format and then put that in. I think there's a website you put in. It will render it as your ERD diagram, which is pretty cool. So what Louisa did is she took that concept and then made it into the Dataverse API. So once you've done your diagram, you're happy with your ERD. You take that mermaid format, which is a text format. You spit it into the machine and it will create those tables and those columns and those relationships.

Speaker 1:

Doesn't that sound like something else that we might have in the platform?

Speaker 2:

It sounds a little bit what plan designer does, but plan designer is, of course, has some AI behind it, so sometimes it's a little bit different. Plan designer doesn't deal with global option sets and hers does, and hers is actually less AI driven but more deterministic driven. So again it kind of goes, reiterates the past, the thing of, yes, ai is really cool, can do a lot of new things. But sometimes, like what you said, a flow should just be a flow, it just should follow a deterministic pattern. So definitely check out it's open source. You can download it from github, being open source too. If you want to contribute, I'm sure she's open to those contributions to help modify this.

Speaker 1:

So this is probably a tool that should be in every solution solution architects toolbox and I'm looking for her to create the other way around, because how many of you would like something that automatically documented your whole um data model and drew it out.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and drew it out as a mermaid chart, for instance. Right, that would be something very interesting. Yes, okay, so moving on, and actually we're doing good on time and the list is very short this time right, because, because I was traveling and not, yeah, getting ready for this and everything like that.

Speaker 1:

But actually this is very interesting. Jonas Rapp is here. Jonas, he's not in the room, right? Oh, okay, so you can tell him that we talked about it and we also had that both of us. But right, so this is flipping the query in Fetchxml Builder with AI, and this is something that would, if I knew about this before I saw this post. I just this week did this manually.

Speaker 2:

Oh no.

Speaker 1:

It's such a hassle because you use XRM Toolbox and you use the Fetch XML Builder and it was a huge, long relationship from one to the other and you have all the link entities and then suddenly you go oh no wait, it's the other way around, or someone changes the relationship. You have to flip it on its head. Well, actually, now Jonas created a tool in the Xterm toolbox that allows you to flip that around with a click of a button, which is freaking fantastic, and Jonas is here. So if you guys like this and want to chat with him about it or check it out, Buy Jonas a beer.

Speaker 1:

Definitely buy.

Speaker 2:

Jonas a beer.

Speaker 1:

So this is very cool, and then this I haven't seen.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so this goes under our fun section. So you see, here in our OneNote we do bounce around a little bit. When I saw this, this actually was really interesting. So this is a post put out by Scott Hanselman. For those of you who maybe not know, scott Hanselman does a very popular podcast. He's been running it for like a thousand years. Even before His podcast is so old it's older than Marcus's CRM Rocks podcast and that podcast has been around forever.

Speaker 1:

And he's also here.

Speaker 2:

He is also here. Yeah, I did see that. So yeah, so basically what Microsoft is doing, so what I started in my career with computers, I started writing in BASIC on my Commodore 64, which was the 6502 BASIC. Of course it was modified a little bit. Microsoft this past week or two has made that open source, that old B, old basic interpreter, kind of a, just I don't know kind of a bit of a throwback, which was really interesting and it's just kind of when I saw that I thought, okay, this is a fun little post. It brings me back to my roots when I got my journey into technology as well. Who here started writing? Who wrote? Who's written like basic before back in the old? Yeah, all the guys with gray hair mostly.

Speaker 1:

And Trish, of course, and Trish, trish, not you, of course.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, no gray hair Sorry.

Speaker 1:

And not a guy.

Speaker 2:

last I checked, no, no, no, I know Love you.

Speaker 1:

Alright, okay, this I've seen pictures of this looks like fun. Yes, okay, this. I've seen pictures of this looks like fun.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I've written and I've had a dot. Okay, I'm showing my age now. I had a dot matrix printer. I printed out code and tried to edit and fix what's wrong and everything. Yeah, so, yeah, yeah, it brings me back.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, 100%, yeah, right. So actually we have a problem because we're at the bottom of the list.

Speaker 2:

No, we're not. We skipped over stuff, I'm sure.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, okay, you look at the stuff, but actually what this allows us to do is open it up for questions. Yeah, oh, yeah, wow, which we can do. Or we could also show our sources and go through some of the newsletters where we get our content, if we wanted to.

Speaker 2:

Right. Does anybody have any questions for us or about the podcast or?

Speaker 1:

no-transcript.

Speaker 2:

Very quiet crowd. Oh, we do have a question how often do you have this book up? Yeah, so yeah, the question is how often do we have the podcast? Every two weeks we publish. It gets published on Wednesdays. So the way our schedule is right now, we will be releasing this episode on Wednesday. And we're on YouTube, we're on Spotify, apple Podcasts and wherever podcasts are found, and we do have both a video and an audio. Well, basically it's the video version on Spotify and YouTube, but we have the audio version as well. But, yeah, great question, and we've been doing this podcast now for since March of 2023. So, wow, almost two years this spring. Wow, that's pretty cool.

Speaker 1:

We should probably celebrate.

Speaker 2:

Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1:

Yes, cake, have a party. So this is our. I actually had to no, no, no wait. So this is our. I actually had to no, no, no wait. I should have brought the podcast up, but this is where you can find us. This is what you're looking for. If you're looking for the logo and the site, this is where you get all the latest episodes. Yep, and I also wanted to shine a little light on some of the sources for our content. Karina and Daniel is actually here, and Magnus, who run the Power Platform weekly newsletter, shows up in my inbox every Monday morning and it's full of resources and what came out lately that last week. So this is one of the sources where we find our information.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so this is where you can see the MyRibBent data risk converter that Lee's Freeze made, for instance.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and a lot of the videos and content and things like that. So it's a really great resource to kind of stay on top of things. So there is a lot of stuff to go through every week on that. But I highly recommend if you haven't already subscribed to the Power Platform Weekly. Also, there's on Wednesdays the Power Platform Dev Weekly, which is very similar to this but really focuses more on the pro development side of the Power Platform. So just magically bring that up. And the other thing that we typically do too is, of course we're we're on LinkedIn this is the same as probably everybody else to see what's going on. If we see something interesting uh, come up on a on an article there, like you see here, uh, some of those other links we will grab those links, put them in the one note. Sometimes, if we see something really cool, it's almost like a contest of who can get it into the one note first yeah so yeah, a few doubles this time as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yep, yeah, that's it, I think right so I think we're going to wrap it up, and what we usually do before we do that is to talk about what's coming, because we're at an event right now, um, which we have been talking about for a while.

Speaker 2:

Well, I did want to talk a little bit about nordic summit, so so we're here today live recording How's it been your day so far with Nordic Summit. I know you are working, you're getting badges handed out and you're directing people and everything. How's it been going?

Speaker 1:

It has been going so smoothly, I must say, because I am part of the organizing committee, but we do have 15 volunteers who do a fantastic job, so round of applause for them. And so actually the work that we do is majority through the year. But of course, this is when she's come to shove and we need to actually pull through, and I'm really happy about how it all turned out and it's been very calm to be an organizer here. It's a lot of work, but we're all calm and it's all working as it should. And, of course, if anyone wants to contribute, we're always looking for new people. It's a very good experience my favorite.

Speaker 1:

I can say that we went to dinner Thursday night and then we had a bit too much to drink and when we came back, girl said okay, so let's go in the room and do some work. And me and auntie went you are kidding, right? And she's like, no, no, and so she pushed us all into a room and then we thought, okay, what do we do? So we kicked our shoes off and we bought some more drinks and we put some music on and we were singing and dancing and doing all the work and it's a lot of fun, and so you make friends and you have a good time, and that's why we're all here and doing this, volunteering our time.

Speaker 2:

Awesome. And you just had a session I did with Manju and Manju's not here, but it was part of the mentoring program, which I was really pleased to be a part of this year. So we worked together on this presentation, we did around PowerPages and Copilots and I think Manju knocked it out of the park. Oh yeah, her demo was just spot on. She kind of hit the high points. A great job and was really and she didn't need me there at all, I think I was just eye candy of some sort.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, usually. That's why I have you keep you around as well. No, I was talking to Manju after her session and there was a guy coming around to say, and he said, best session of the conference. Oh, wow, Okay, so I mean she knocked it out of the park park. Definitely, definitely, but we are not that. You are not done. You have more things. You're more busy than I am today actually now you're doing the mentoring, speed mentoring in about seven minutes.

Speaker 2:

Yes, of course, and then you also have a very honorable work yeah, so I'll be wrapping it up with the, the keynote, uh, about a topic I I'm very. Yeah, here I go already. This is going to be a disaster.

Speaker 2:

This is going to be hard About burnout in our industry and I think a lot of us have, over the years, have either experienced it, could be in the process of experience it, or you could hit it at some point. So hopefully I can kind of share my journey, kind of help people identify the warning signs a little bit, kind of address a little bit what we're all feeling. It is very personal, very emotional I'm. Honestly. I am freaking out because there's going to be 300 people staring at me, but I will have my friends in the crowd, like before I have done this session before and that will help me through it.

Speaker 1:

We love you, support you and you're very brave for talking about this in front of all these people. So that will be the closing keynote and that will be the last thing that happens from the organizing part before the mingle and drinks. And now my computer died.

Speaker 2:

No, just the screen went out. Oh, okay, yeah. So what I do want to do, because this is the first time we have done this podcast recording in front of people.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

I'm going to try to turn, see if I can. Oh, I can. Yeah, oh no, this is trying to. I'm still new. That's so nice, it's so new, but yeah, basically, yeah. So there's everybody in the crowd. For those who are watching at home on Wednesday we can pretend we did the live yeah we can pretend we did live.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, we did live. So, yeah, really appreciate all you folks coming to the session today and we really appreciate those who have been listening over the years and hopefully to continue to do so. We're evolving, we're changing, we're trying stuff out. We're trying stuff out like this today we look at the podcast itself. We deviate a lot away from sometimes lately, away from the Power Platform talk about things around AI, which I think is top of mind for everybody. So it will always be Boost and the reason why is because we've branded ourselves permanently that it will be something, something Boost. It may not ever always be Power Platform Boost, but it will be Boost Podcast.

Speaker 1:

And also we have ducks which we should have had.

Speaker 2:

I should have had my bag of ducks, so get me later. We have a bag of Power Platform Boost ducks that are not going back to Canada with me?

Speaker 1:

Yes, because his wife doesn't want to.

Speaker 2:

Well, my wife carried them over last, a bunch over last time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, for security. I think that was a fun exercise.

Speaker 2:

But, as always, thank you for being like the best podcast co-host ever. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for listening. If you liked this episode, please make sure you share it with your friends and colleagues in the community and be sure to leave a rating or a review on your favorite streaming service. That makes it easier for others to find us. Follow us on social platforms and make sure you don't miss a single episode. Thank you for listening to the Power Platform Boost podcast with your host, luric Akebek, and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates. We'll see you next time.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Nick Doelman

Host
Head Shot

Ulrikke Akerbæk

Host