Power Platform Boost Podcast

Live-ish (#68)

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

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0:00 | 25:32

Podcast Setup Struggles

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

Introduction and Format Overview

Speaker 2

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

Playwright Testing for Model-Driven Apps

Speaker 2

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

Will Vibe Coding Kill Low-Code?

Speaker 1

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 .

Microsoft's Latest Name Change

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

Expanded File Tolerance for Agents

Speaker 1

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

Model-Driven Apps Cheat Sheet

Speaker 1

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 ?

Mermaid Data Modeling Tool

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 .

Fetch XML Builder with AI

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

Microsoft BASIC Open Source Release

Speaker 2

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

Nordic Summit Experience

Speaker 1

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

Podcast Wrap-Up and Future Plans

Speaker 1

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 .

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Nick Doelman

Host
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Ulrikke Akerbæk

Host