Power Platform Boost Podcast
The Power Platform Boost Podcast is your timely update of what's new and what is happening in the community of Microsoft business applications. Join hosts Ulrikke Akerbæk and Nick Doelman for a lively discussion of all things Power Platform!Like what you hear? Buy us a beer: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/Powerplatboost
Power Platform Boost Podcast
Creative BOOST (#76)
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News
- Generative Pages: Link Them to Your Model-Driven App Forms by Ben den Blanken
- Enhancing Canvas Apps with Generative Pages in Model-Driven Apps by Rasika Chaudhary
- Dataverse ERD Visualizer: See Your Data Model, Understand Your Data by Allan deCastro
- Can you build an XrmToolBox tool with Zero experience -Vibe coding with GitHub Copilot by Matt Collins-Jones
- Power Pages: Bring your own code! (Tutorial) by Nick Doelman
- Exam AB-731: AI Transformation Leader » The CRM Ninja by EY Kalman
- Code Apps Simplified: The BEST Power Apps by Charles Sexton and Josh Giles
- Power Apps PCF Components - A Functional Overview For Beginners Nuno Subtil
- What is AI builder and what is it used for? – Malin Martnes by Malin Martnes
- About Power Apps per app plans - Power Platform
- The One Card: Build Once, Speak All Languages by Adi Leibowitz
- Tech Talks presents: From Prompts to Python: Code Interpreter in Microsoft Copilot Studio by Scott Durow
- Copilot Studio Agent Academy
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Kicking Off And New Year Banter
SPEAKER_02And then also piggybacking a little bit on the thing we talked about last time, does it enhance our creativity or does it reduce our creativity, creativity? And I think actually just us talking about this now enhances the fact that it does boost our creativity when we can play with all these things and it kind of lowers the barrier to for entry and it kind of lowers the threshold for everything. It makes it not so scary anymore. And yeah, I'm like you could say I'm buzzing. So yeah. And we're live. Hello, Nick.
NickHey, live live or recording.
SPEAKER_02Recording. We don't do live. We can't do live. We don't know how to do live. We may crack the quote at some point. But it looks like it looked like you were searching for the button, so I just pushed it for us.
NickI was actually searching for something else, but it's all good. We're good. We're we're Art We all. Happy New Year, I guess.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, happy new year. I think we hit people's um temples at New Year's, actually, last time, last episode. But uh yeah, happy new year. Yeah.
NickWell, I was I was talking to a friend of mine in the gym the other morning about because I hadn't seen her since like before mid-December, said Happy New Year. And she goes, Happy New Year. And she goes, at what point do we stop saying Happy New Year? So we we decided, me and her, my friend Roshni, who um probably doesn't listen to the episode, even though I I did point her towards it. And then we decided collectively, we said, okay, January 10th, that's the cutoff day.
SPEAKER_02Wow, that's really soon. And then I also saw, yeah, I think so. And I mean, because you know, if I haven't talked to anyone, I'll just go January, you know, at the end of January, I'm kind of over it. But if I haven't seen somebody, but yeah, I guess it's it's getting to that point. And I also saw in the in the chat, one of the WhatsApp groups that I'm in, someone said happy new year, and it was like, I don't know, 8 a.m. the next day for me. And then they got shit for the people are like, what are you going? Where are you at? Uh, you know, uh New Years is like yesterday. And then someone went, uh, no, you kind of go happy new year for a long time after New Year's, and then like there's this big rant back and forth, and I was like, Well, if this is what we have in uh disagreement on, then the rest of the world should be all good.
NickI mean, sure, the rest of the world is good in a sense.
SPEAKER_02Or not at all in another sense, but that's for another podcast that's leaving out.
SPEAKER_00Totally not this one. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Not this one. This is politics free for the most part.
Old Ways Vs New Shiny Power Tools
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, politics in the power platform, there's a lot of that going on. I think we have a bit of a, you know, if we're gonna look at the polarization and the left wing versus the right wing or the legacy wing versus the future wing, we are kind of in the middle at the moment in the power platform where we have these all these new shiny toys that we can play with that aren't really GA overall yet. And then you have the old way of working, which we're kind of sick of and we know it's gonna be kind of not what we want to do going forward, but we can't really use new stuff yet because it's not GA. And yeah, so that's um that's my awkward segue.
Ben’s Generative Pages Deep Dive
NickCool, but I think but I think a lot of this new stuff we can incorporate into the old, which I think when we look at our very first article on our list um from Ben Ben Den Blanken from the Netherlands. Of course, we both know Ben, super great guy. Definitely, I know Ben listens, so hey Ben, thanks for listening.
SPEAKER_02Hey Ben.
NickYeah, and he he wrote a really cool blog post. I think we both saw it. Yeah, do you want to kick off and talk a little bit about what Ben was talking about?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so Ben was going through he dove into GenderTube pages and then looking at adding them to a model-driven app and then and kind of pinning them against custom pages. So I think it's a very good uh blog post. He uses a soccer team player, NFL players dynasty ring rankings as his uh use case, which is a good idea if you want to dive in and play with something new, always have a good use case in mind. And he built a generative page around it um to kind of see what it could do, what the limitations were, where he hit some snags, and then he showed us the learnings in his blog post, which I really like. And um, Ben is always really good at I'm such a nerd. I love it when people write blog posts and they kind of have uh a little quote here, a little image here, a little frame here, you know, and Ben is very good at that. So reading his blog post doesn't feel like reading this blow of text. It's it's broken up into very edible pieces and it's easy to go through. And and maybe it's just because our minds work the same, but I always find that Ben's articles or blog posts kind of flow very naturally. So, what do you what did you think?
NickNo, it was really good and it it reiterates what I've always said to people too. Like, oh, how do I learn this stuff? And for me, I'm a my fingers on keyboard type learner. I think we'll talk about hopefully we'll have a chance to talk about that more later in the episode where we talk about hackathons. But what I liked about Ben had a personal project, an NFL fantasy player pool. I know people that are really big into fantasy leagues, um, especially the National Football League and football, like it's huge in North America. So it was actually a bit surprising to see a European kind of focus on this a little bit, especially for American football. But again, it's just taking that personal project and looking at looking at your day-to-day. It's like, okay, what can I do? What can I build to make my life easier? And whether it's building apps or agents or even websites, maybe if you're trying to learn something, I always find a case of find a problem and then solve it and then makes it so much easier to learn because you're doing the research, you're working with the different AI agents to get to a point where you can actually begin to build all of this cool stuff. So good one, Ben. I really enjoyed that blog post, you know, for those reasons as well.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And he lists learnings, and then you kind of have a bit of a conclusion at the end. Will I keep building custom pages? Probably not. And the future is generative. So that's uh the the short of it for from Ben. And uh very good blog post to read through for sure. And also we have another blog post about generative pages.
Embedding Generative Pages In Canvas Apps
NickYeah, and I think this is what I think this is going to be a bit of a theme for the next few months of now that generative pages, it is GA in the US environments, and hopefully it's rolling out to other places soon, because I mean there's a ton of use cases that just keep cropping up. Now, this one was uh from Rashika Shoderi, and she's on the PowerCat team. Of course, people are from the Canvas app side are probably not that people are on sides. I think I use all the technologies, but but people working in Canvas apps going, oh, generative pages looks really cool. I wonder if we could utilize that. And she explains a way about you know being able to build a generative page, but actually embed it in a Canvas app, which I thought was genius because this way you're now beginning to go a little bit outside of the lines of the coloring, which is great in terms of beginning to build, and there might be some definite solutions where a generative page just makes perfect sense. And then partially, I think we're gonna see eventually people kind of migrate away from Canvas apps into this more, like we said, this new world of building power apps in general. But this is a way that it can start introducing things, still use the existing Canvas app infrastructure, but enhance it using some of those new tools. So, Rashika, great post. It was really good. It was very well laid out as well, step by step with code snippets. You know how I love seeing code snippets and blog or blog or post articles like this. So if you're building Canvas apps and you want to be able to utilize some generative pages, definitely check out her post and hopefully you can build some amazing things and enhance your existing Canvas apps.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I think also it bridges the gap in a very interesting way because from the announcements and kind of how this has been laid out and communicated to us, code apps are supposed to kind of replace Canvas apps and then generative pages, they live inside a model-driven app. So when she mixes to do things, of course, if you want to replace Canvas apps with code pay code apps, you have to know your code. You have to know how to start in Visual Studio. You don't have to have the capabilities of creating a code project. Yes, you can vibe code it, but you still have to kind of, it feels more Debbie, right? So some people will feel a little bit alienated by that. So when she has this very detailed kind of, this is the steps, this is where you what you do, this is where you put in this and that and makes it work, it kind of bridges the gap between Canvas apps and model-riven apps and the new way of working in a very nifty way. And I love seeing kind of workarounds like this, and especially when it's from Parcat. It's like, yes. Um, and I saw Nikiza Polyakov's little loveless comment at the bottom is like extra endorsement. Yes, team, stick together and let's find these workarounds.
NickAbsolutely. Yeah, very cool.
SPEAKER_02Yep, definitely. And
Visualizing Dataverse ERDs With AI-Built Tool
SPEAKER_02I saw another thing that's kind of, I don't know, surprising, maybe not the right word, but I saw a post um that is called Dataverse ERD Visualizer. See your data model, understand your data. And then I thought, surely we have this already. And then someone went along and created, so this is Alan DeGusto. He made his own, of course, vibe coded React thingy that you can connect a Dataverse and then you can see your whole data model in an ERD diagram. And I thought, dude, we got this already. But what he points out is that um he knows about so I started to read through, kind of skeptical, thinking, if this guy doesn't know about plan designer and the new ERD diagram thing you can do there, then this is a bit waste of time. But then he says, no, actually, when you work in a very so imagine you have an old an old CRM dynamic 365 implementation, and you have this huge complex data model, it's kind of naive to think that you can just create a push all that into one solution, then create plan from solution. It's not gonna be as dense, it's not gonna be as feature dense as what he created. So this is one of those I want to document the existing thing and also maybe adopting a solution from someone else with lack in documentation. And you want that dynamic ERD diagram, kind of how is things related to one another. And then yeah, so that's why he made a tool that kind of enhances and and kind of brings that same plan designer kind of look and feel, but then makes it even more dense and more future, more future dense. So he has a very good blog post where he talks about kind of why he created it, the process he'd gone through uh thinking about this, and also how to start using this new tool that he created. And a video this is a lot of AI, uh, the whole blog post thingy, you because you recognize this, right? So it's it's um AI buff. It's gonna buff I find that's what I you know you write, you read something that AI created, and it's always a bit it has a added, which this very much do have. Um so it's very long and very extensive, but also very good. So actually, kudos to you, Alan, for bringing this out there and enhancing on something that we don't have already.
NickYeah. No, it was really cool. I saw it as well. I meant to download it and actually install it because in one of my projects I do need to get, I mean, I've written, I've drawn out the data model already, I think using Miro or something like that, but it was a case of because it was the same thing, I kind of thought, oh, I can just load my solution in plan designer and go from there, but it just doesn't do the greatest job
Building An XRM Toolbox Plugin Without Being A Dev
Nickin the world where I'm always open for tools. We talked about Louise's freezes.
SPEAKER_02Mermaid to dataverse.
NickMermaid to Dataverse tool as well, which it works just one way at this point. I know she was working on getting it to work the opposite way as well. But to me, and you've heard me this in projects, me almost ranting about it is like get your data model sorted first. If you can get your data model sorted, and this again, you know, I keep probably repeating it, people probably sick of it, is where we need the SIS the solution architects and people like this, because AI can help you define your data model, but it can help you. It can't, if you let the AI create your data model for you, you're you're you're into trouble. Like even with plan designer, and you know I'm a big fan, I'm still the biggest job I find in Plan Designer is fixing the data model, bringing in existing system tables, relinking things together. So a tool like this, especially if you're kind of going into projects, like the last two projects I'm well, the two projects I'm working on now, they're existing systems. They've been built by other consultants before me. We all and we all think different. And even that's a whole other thread I might just kind of pull in this episode as well about thinking different, how the AIs think different. But being able to pull this and get that information in front of you. And I'm very visual, I think you are as well, seeing those boxes the way it's laid out. And again, this is another example of using the new tools, the the vibe engineering or the AI assisted coding or vibe coding, however you want to call it, of being able to build tools. So we're also going to see a whole new generation, I think, of tools, even in existing things. And we'll talk probably segue next to XRM Toolbox. But now with these tools, a lot of people that have great ideas are getting over that little cusp, that little barrier that's always been there. I've met Alan, I know Alan fairly well, but I'm not sure what where he sits on the developer spectrum. So this is still very cool to see.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And he also mentions the XRM Toolbox extension that you can use. But yeah, of course, that's built on that's existed for a little while already. This is brand new and it's very AI driven, an MCP server and all that new shiny tool set. So yeah, definitely something also very easy to build on. So yeah, I uh absolutely am all for it. So that was a segue over to your next thing, which also has to do with Xtreom Toolbox.
NickYeah, so this is our friend Matt Collins Jones. And Matt actually he calls out the very first slide says, I am not a developer. He says, I don't claim to be a developer. I've designed things, I've learned how to code certain things and got better over the years. But I am someone not someone who lives in the I integrated developer environment day in and day out. Um and of course the rise of iconic.
SPEAKER_00Yes, what is IT?
NickSo, anyways, but he goes, which which kind of blew me, because I have a bunch of XRM toolbox ideas in my head. And I've always I've seen presentations by our friend Jonas Rapp and a few others. And I'm like, okay, I need some like I need to sit down someday and start building out this, you know, some of these XRM toolbox ideas I have, right?
SPEAKER_02Is that above or below? It's uh above or below learning to play the guitar.
NickIt's probably above somewhere.
SPEAKER_02Okay. Okay, above or below learning to web develop.
NickOh no, that actually is a little bit higher, but we'll talk about that as well.
SPEAKER_02Okay. So right in the middle. Okay, nice.
NickI mean, you know how it is, right? Like I'm sure you have extra you have extra toolbox ideas that pop up in your head too, right? We've we've talked about this. Would it be good? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01No, I mean that's the tangy and yeah, and the all the other guys. I mean, come on. It's just too dev for me.
NickYeah.
SPEAKER_01Okay, move on.
NickSo, anyways, Matt goes through the whole process and creates a plugin. And again, it's talking about his journey, about things that didn't work, um, things that did work, about using the latest template for Visual Studio 2020, realizing, okay, that actually is not quite compatible yet. Because the XRM toolbox is built on the Windows Presentation Foundation, which is a little bit of an older legacy way of doing things. That's why the user interface looks a little twins-ish, to be fair. But, anyways, he went through and then kind of got to a point where he actually had and has this thing called the flow solution finder now sitting in the XRM toolbox. So this is awesome, Matt. Um, this is something I I know that people would love to get. So it's a great blog post about a journey of going from a I know nothing, but this is like I said, building a project that you want. Here's my here's my pain point. How do I solve it? And these tools get folks like you know, Matt and just over that cusp and over the edge into building some amazing things. And this is what's really exciting me about all this new stuff coming out. So yeah, great to check out Matt's uh blog post and check out his solution as well. And then yeah, I'm very curious to see what I think the XRM toolbox still has a lot of life left into it. And now that we have tools and people like Matt that are sharing what they're learning, I think it's gonna open the door to a lot more very valuable tools and building power platform solutions uh with the XRM toolbox. And yeah, so good job.
SPEAKER_02And I love that this he put the prompt in there. It's like build me an XRM toolbox tool that allows me to see a list of all the cloud flows in my environment, add a column to show me what solution uh that the flow is included in. And if it's as easy as that, it actually runs off and it does uh the majority of the thing it understands. I think you can put it above learning to play the guitar really easily because it doesn't seem like it's such a um a massive amount of work. That's my first point. And then my second point is something that I talked to a customer and a colleague about yesterday. No, when uh earlier last week, what the hiss it, what's my name, Murdo. And and that was because he was he was telling me he was diving into um to PowerFX and he was using uh uh kind of uh Marshall Theory specified uh co-pilot or uh chat GPT or something, and he said it didn't really do a very good job. So he's like, well, read the documentation, give me some examples, do, do, do, do, do, and I just couldn't really grasp it. It made a lot of mistakes, it made a lot of assumptions because, of course, with PowerFX, you have three different areas that you can apply PowerFX to, and all three is kind of different. So the syntax you use for a Canvas app won't necessarily work for power pages, which is a subtle little thing that AI doesn't really catch. And also we found it didn't really find a lot of resources. And this, so he he asked me about it. I said, Do you know what I'm missing? Is there
Why We Still Need Blogs In An AI World
SPEAKER_02a big repository somewhere that I'm not finding? What is the thing? And I said, actually, I think this is part of the in Norway we say beer natya, beer favor, kind of the we are shooting ourselves in the foot a little bit because we've stopped creating blog posts, we've stopped writing about the things that we discovered because we think if I'm able to vibe code this in five minutes, who needs another blog post? Today, I was researching something for a presentation I'm doing this year, and I worked with Chat DPT on it. And now that you can see the reasoning that it's doing before it's giving you the answer, the third resource it pulled out was my blog post. And that just blew my mind. And then I thought, Jesus, I haven't made a blog post in like eons because I'm thinking, like he did, we don't need to blog anymore because AI will learn about everything. But then back to something we talked about earlier this year, who's gonna make the crazy things that AI is gonna we need to we need to continue to build this repository that is the internet to keep enriching the AI service. It'll only be as good as the thing we feed it with. And if we stop feeding it, I think I underestimated how important it is that we keep feeding it. So when kind of Michael's go goes and look at all these things and he goes, Well, there's been a lot of external toolbox tools. Created already. I'm sure the dev's got it figured out. I'm not a dev. I'm gonna see if I can do this. And he can with an easy, easy prompt and some fiddling. And he thinks, maybe, I don't know. I haven't talked to him, but the reasoning might be this is very easy for me to do. It didn't take me as long as it wasn't as hard as I expected. I'm sure anyone else can do it as well. But just the fact that he put that into words and it put it into a blog post and shared it to the world, it creates so many good ripple effects. He posted online and he shows people like me, I'm not a deb. I could do this. Maybe you can too. So he kind of opens the box and he he lowers the threshold for anyone that thought that this can't be done, it's out of my reach. It prompts me to think, oh, maybe actually I could do something like that. That's one. And then he puts it into words and he he keeps feeding the AI with these things. And I love to see that. So I think this is my very long-winded way of saying, keep producing content, people. Not just because I do this, we did this podcast and I love sharing it, but feed the beasts and feed it with your voice and your way of thinking and your reasoning and your context and your experience. Keep feeding it because we all benefit. And if we stop, then we all lose.
NickYes. Rant check.
SPEAKER_02Check. That was me. You're up.
NickYeah, yeah. Well, no, but it's interesting because I mean, I didn't, I mean, talk about a bit of a shameless self-promotion. I didn't put this link in our show notes, but I'll talk about it anyway. Um, so last over the the Christmas break, I created a video and a blog post, and I spent probably the most work I've ever done in building content for just the one video and one blog. And it was basically taking a PowerPage, creating a PowerPages single page application or bring your own code to PowerPages. And I learned a ton of things. Because if you had asked me a year ago to write a React website, I wouldn't even know where to start. But this one I went through step by step, same thing, very kind of similar journey as Matt did. I thought I'm going to build that same sample site that I've built a hundred times, giving the PowerPages talks using, you know, the standard way or whatever the regular way. But then I did it through kind of GitHub Copilot and then went step by step and going, thinking, what do people want to know? First off, how it works, how to upload it in PowerPages, what's the benefit? So I basically created a site. And then first off, just created a very simple
Bring Your Own Code To Power Pages
NickReact site. And funny, looking at some of these other videos and things about getting started with code apps or PCF controls. Everybody like realized, hey, we're all starting from the same thing. We're all loading Node.js, the package manager. We're all uh creating TypeScript. It's creating the same structure. And then we all branch off to our different areas, whether we're creating PowerPages or a PCF control or a code app. And then what I also found, so then I talked about how to connect it to Dataverse because obviously in the PowerPages, that's the benefit. And then the authentication. Now that was the interesting one. I had to reiterate a few times to get the authentication going. Um and then, and then basically got all that wired up. Did of course the web roles, the table permissions, the whole little bit. A couple of things I learned through this. First off, make sure your recording works in Camtasia because you could talk for 20 minutes without the record button being hit. That's frustrating to say the least.
SPEAKER_02And that's why your friends hit that button for you sometimes, but okay, you let me know next time and I'll go in and hit it for you. It's fine.
NickPerfect. But then also, and then of course, by doing it multiple times, this was the interesting part. And I was actually talking to Benedict Bergman about this as well. I rebuilt basically, I kept, once I had it all generated, and again, took a few iterations, generated one for the blog post, created through the process to create it for the video. Of course, having to backtrack a little bit. But then I also, at each step of the way, I actually told GitHub Copilot, create me a prompt that I should have used at the very beginning to create this bit of code. And I actually put that prompt itself in a markdown file in the GitHub repository I put with this. But wanting to see it work, I actually use those prompts again when I kind of did the one of the one of my many takes, the video recording. But each time, if I put maybe three of these sites side by side, they're the same but different, subtly different. It's the same way if I actually gave three different developers, okay, this is my spec, go build the site. And it all came back differently. And I'm sure if someone took the prompts that I created, they're going to get slightly different results again than what I got. So this is sort of the other thing that we're kind of the world we're living in. It's yeah, it's great that we can prompter way things, but also understanding what's going on in the background, especially in the authentication part. There was, I looked at the code and like, why isn't this working? And I actually had to go in a big long chat with GitHub Copilot. Okay, this is why it's not working. And it was like thinking, hmm, maybe try this, maybe try this. It was almost very weird. It was almost like working with somebody. And then finally said, Well, you could try this, but this seems to be an older way of doing things. And I and that part worked. And surprise. Surprise. So then I actually made sure that that idea was incorporated in my prompt. It was like the login URL or something, or the log out URL. Make sure it's using this URL for the logout based on blah, blah, blah. And then from there created these prompts. It was also interesting. This is the very first, probably, well, maybe not the first blog post, but it was a blog post where you know me, I always like to paste code, code snippets. I pasted prompts.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
NickAnd I remember last year with Victor Dantest, he did a he did a presentation. And it was like, there's always, can you share your deck? Can you share the code? It was like, can you share your prompts?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
NickThat's sort of uh the the way this is going. So overall, this is um again, I'm probably going down a rabbit hole here, but seeing people like Matt, there's another uh post we'll talk or another video we'll talk about about building PCF controls. All of a sudden now, and like with Alan's thing as well, these tools are allowing us to get over the over the hump. And we're gonna, and in and for me, natural language is the pure version of low code. So we're using natural language, but I also think it's important to have some of those technical skills to know what's going on, but also to do it, like you said, creating content. Going through, I learned a ton. I learned a ton about how React works, I learned a ton of how authentication works, I learned much more about the Dataverse web API and how it interacts. So these are this is the great thing I love about this vibe engineering as well. And people like Matt and Alan that are building things and Ben, for that matter, as well. We're we're upping our skills by doing it. And by upping our skills, that just is going to turn into better code and being able to do more things because I think where yes, AI is doing a lot, but there's still no shortage of ideas and things we want to build. And now this is enabling a lot more people to be able to build stuff. So yeah, yeah, that was sorry, it was my little segue. Wasn't a rant, it was more of a this is this is what Nick learned over the this is what I did during my vacation.
SPEAKER_02No, that's great. Uh yeah, I absolutely love it. And I
Code Apps: Starting The Modern Stack
SPEAKER_02think, yeah, we're gonna put some links in the show notes as well if you feel comfortable sharing it at this point um to the the things you built. Uh, because this is so important. And I love the fact that you say, you know, it seems like we're all starting from the same place, and then we kind of just and then we learned so much kind of on our way. But I think this is essential. I I've started in a new project now, a PowerPages project, where actually it's very little PowerPages, more React. And of course I'm out of my depth, but I see the way that this guy is working with AI and kind of him and AI have this little project and they're having so much fun. It's actually really hard to get into it because they're just moving so fast that it's up to and they got it and got it, everything in his fingertips. And I'm like, hey, what are you doing? Hey and I go, and I look and I go in my co-pod and I go, get up to speed, find out what they're doing, get read all the docs, what happened since last last Friday? To try to keep up because I'm 50% in a project, meaning every other day. So every other day when I connect to it, it's like, oh, he refactored everything. Oh freaking hell. And then kind of, yeah. So it is very interesting keeping up with this as well, I find, because my mind is still the same. It's the work at the same speed, it's it still works in the same way. And some things I take longer with, and some things I have to learn, and and some things I'm good at, something I'm not as good at. So I've yeah, that's kind of been on my mind lately. How do I keep up with someone who's kind of in it and it's very quick and and I'm not keeping up? So yeah, that was kind of that came to mind. But yeah, freaking fantastic. I can't wait to see what you do. Okay, let's move on. Trying to find a good segue here. Yeah. So can I just share something that is a bit um that inspired me this week?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for sure.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_02I saw a post from from the C Ram Ninja AYY that we all uh know and love. Uh he has now been on a tour through the new AI certifications from Microsoft. So he shared a blog post about the AI transformation leader and how he so his blog post is kind of a um a bit of an overview of the certification, what it's for, who it's for, and then also what it entails in terms of what you need to go through to to um to pass it and the mindset behind it. He goes through what he um went through to learn about it, and then he also lists the other one that he's gone through. So this is AB731, which is the AI transformation leader, but there's AB Um 900 and uh AB100, uh agentic AI Business Solutions Architect and Business Professional, and there's a lot of new AI uh certifications, which really got me excited because then this is a way for us to be. We're consultants and architects, but I think it's also very valuable to lift your eyes a little bit, lift your gait, take a step back, kind of go into the persona of a a leader, a business leader, and how you should think about AI and transforming your business and how to work with it, because it will influence and give you some context into your own work and how to think about how to align and talk to stakeholders and that kind of thing. So it reminded me that exams and certifications exist because I haven't done one in a while. So it's kind of a slap in the face and also a bit um inspiring. So thank you, UI, for that. Um and yeah, so I just wanted to share that.
NickPerfect. Yeah. Oh, just I just got all the power platform ones renewed over like last couple of months. And now here's a whole set of new ones. But yeah, I agree. These certifications kind of force you to put eyeballs on new content and new ways and give your exposure. So when we're having those conversations with clients, going, wait a minute, this reminds me, oh yeah, I saw this while studying for an exam and this could apply here. Again, best way to learn fingers on keyboard. But sometimes you got to know something to start, I guess.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And also it's a bit crazy if you kind of look at it from another perspective. It's a bit
Localizing Adaptive Cards For Agents
SPEAKER_02crazy that create exams and certifications about this stuff because it changes so quickly. But also the thought leadership around it doesn't really change that much. So if you want to go in and be certified in some type of technology now, I think that's out of date much sooner than this. This is more business context. This is more your role as an architect. This is what you need to know about kind of the workings around AI and how to think about it, which will apply to even though they upgrade to no G GPT six, it will still apply. So I think this is something that I'm that's why I got excited about it, because the thought leadership around it will kind of have a longer lifespan, so to speak.
NickYeah, and also a good career uh thing to have in your career, a feather, good career feather in your cap, something.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So if you need that, then have at it. Um definitely. So uh next on the list is codaps. So we talked about generative pages, and now we have a blog post about code apps.
NickYeah, so this was Charles Sexton and Josh, Josh Giles, Josh Gills, Josh. Sorry if I mispronounced your name, or this is what we do on the podcast. We mispronounce names. Charles and Josh.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
NickSo I think this is uh, I think part of a series of videos they're doing. And this is this is great. It's just Charles and Josh just talking, but going through code, kind of going through the process from me just naming on about creating a PowerPages single page application to almost to myself. This is Josh and Charles. They're talking through the process of creating a code app. And at this point, they're really just getting the fundamentals. And this is where I said we're all starting from the same thing because they're like they open up Visual Studio Code. Yep. Load Node.js. Yep. So far, we're all on the same path. And then they start a React project. Yep, so far, so good. And then they veer off, okay. Here's how we load it up as a code application. Okay, here's where the fork in the road branches from code apps versus PowerPages single page
PCF Components Made Understandable
Nickapplications or PCF components, as we'll talk about in a few minutes. But is this very interesting? Because, like, oh wow, we're all kind of starting from the same spot here. And this is where I think it's important to kind of understand a little bit about you, don't have to be like a React expert or a TypeScript expert, but kind of understand that this is the code that's being generated. And you can read through it and then being able to have those intelligent conversations with your pro devs to bring them in to do the heavy lifting that lasts 20% while like it's so it's the same story we've always been doing, but now the low-code tools are changing a little bit and per and and we're actually coming to our developers with here is actual code versus here is a black box that you'll have to integrate with kind of thing. So they do a very clear, very great step-by-step video. And I they do, I'm really looking forward to their next one as they continue on this journey. So if you haven't seen that, definitely check out that video if you're just getting started in this stuff. And again, it really shows about these barriers being lowered for folks that have been working in the low code space for a long time that these things are somewhat accessible. Don't get scared with Visual Studio Code. It's actually, yeah, it's a big user interface with a lot of code. Once you get into it, I don't know. I find it a lot of fun. But again, that's just me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, I think that goes for a lot of us. And it's like I said, it seems scary and overwhelming, but if you give it a go, I think a lot of people would be surprised to actually how accessible it is. So yeah, definitely with you on that one. Great job. Then let's talk about something else. Let's talk about language and adaptive cards. I came across um blog post by Adi Le Bowitz, which talks about um the adaptive cards. So you can now adaptive card adaptive cards have been around for a very long time. It used to be about getting something in an email and you could um show up in a different way, or you get an um approval flow or something through a flow, and it will you could create a card in a visualization around it. Now the use case is more with uh copilots and agents where you can customize the UI, you have this little card, and you can choose if you want an image, a link, some text, some buttons, some call to actions, stuff like that. Now, up until this point, there was an there, no, sorry, there was an announcement, I think a couple of weeks ago, that now language support in Copilot Studio agents have been improved, which is a new and good feature. So that's also worth mentioning. So multilingual agents is now a lot easier than it used to be. But still, adaptive cards, you would actually have to develop and and configure each card for each language. So if you like you and me have the same thing, right? You live in Canada, you need to have everything in a Canadian and in in Canadian French, French Canadian. I in Norway, we all also always do Norwegian and English, sometimes also Swedish. It depends. So that's a lot of work to maintain. But now they found a solution where you can actually use one card and you have this almost JSON setup where you can configure the different labels in different languages. So you have one card and then you have one translation file that includes all the labels in the different languages, and then you kind of just reference that label in the card. Does that sound familiar to you?
NickThat sounds very familiar, yes.
SPEAKER_02How am I saying this before? And like, this is code, this is this is contents of the Pets in PowerPages.
Rediscovering AI Builder’s Practical Power
SPEAKER_02This is what we've done for ages. So, you know, it's just okay then. And this is uh, so of course he's using uh Klingon from no, not Klingon. It's not Klingon. That's uh what uh Star Trek.
SPEAKER_00Star Wars. Oh, get your get your get your nerd right.
SPEAKER_02Jesus Christ, I'm such a bad nerd. Minus points for me. Never mind. What's the language in Lord of the Rings? Come on. I need to find out. He said it's here somewhere. Because he actually translated it into that into Elvish, maybe? Yeah, let's go with Elvish. Probably not that.
NickOh, you know, it was a type, yeah. Translate the card he translates to Italian, but yeah, Striderk is called compassion. Oh, it's just some of the names. Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_02Oh, okay. Anyway, static adaptive cards now appear in localized files, no complex card management workflow needed, and mixed content is localizable and using set text variable. So that is the big takeaway. So thank you for that great blog post.
NickYeah, and I think he's all also from the cat team, I believe.
SPEAKER_02Oh yeah.
NickYeah, I think so. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I I love that you get your people right because I'm I just got to.
NickWe'll fact check that, but I think so.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, okay, good. Sounds good. Do you want to talk about PowerSp component next?
NickYeah, so again, this is kind of on the journey of, like I said, the the creating of you know Visual Studio Code, getting Node.js installed. And then here's the third fork in the road that we saw. And this is uh a video, it was actually hosted as part of Hudang's Power Academy.
SPEAKER_02Power Academy.
NickAnd he posted this, and he even said during this recording, um, he said, Oh, I'm gonna post this on YouTube because it's so good. And the person that's running the presentation is Nuno Subtilt. Um, and I I believe I think I've met Nuno somewhere um in the back of my head. But, anyways, he goes through and goes very step by step, a great presentation, um, explains what PCF components are, but goes through and builds a very simple one. And I know you and I have been talking for a year that we're gonna build PCF components. So I I looked at this, I'm like, oh, and again, this is like this isn't as hard as I always maybe envisioned it to be. I remember seeing uh demonstrations years ago. I think Jason Latimer did one of the very first demos I seen on building PCF components, going, okay, I need to I need to sit down and do this. This was six or seven years ago, and here we are. Just need these refreshers every so often. But it goes through step by step, explains it. He builds a very simple PCF component where you actually type in some text and it will actually update the colors of that text within the model-driven app based on what he did. And it's very easy to follow. And it's just it's just one of those videos that it just sort of like, yeah, you could sit down and it's just so well done. So, Nuno, thanks for uh being able to share that. And of course, Hoodang for posting that on the YouTube for everybody to see. So if you do need to build PCF components or want to learn, I highly recommend that's a great place to start and get you going on building PCF components. And again, it's all part of this. I think it's very clear this is again part of that journey of I've never built.
Power Apps Per App Licensing Changes
NickAn XRM toolbox tool before, but I can do it now. Never build a code app before, never build a static or uh it's not a static, a single page application before. These things are becoming more and more accessible with these tools that are coming out, which I think is just it's just going to be a good thing overall.
SPEAKER_02Yep. I completely agree. And uh as like I said, when you see the same thing over and over and you kind of lower that threshold, it doesn't seem so scary anymore. Um and it is the entry to everything. So maybe we'll finally get around to it.
SPEAKER_01Maybe.
SPEAKER_02Or or maybe we don't have to anymore. Maybe it's not the thing we thought it would be. Next on the list is also something kind of blast from the past. Um if adaptive cards isn't uh old enough tech for you, then AI Buuilder should be, because AI Builder is probably the oldest AI capability in the box. I played with AI Builder 10 years ago or more. Um and it's quietly and kind of a little bit subtly under the radar, evolved and grown into this great tool in the toolbox, which is overlooked so often. And now Marlene Martinez has done a blog post series about the kind of the elementary things of the pilot platform, and kind of and then she's asked, um, co-pilot, explain it to me in the simplest term you can. Explain it to me like I'm a 10-year-old. Explain this to me like it's I need to use it, and it's the my first day on the job. And then she's also reaching out to community members. I think we mentioned some of her blog posts in the past. Yeah. To kind of get a feel of okay, what does it do? What is it for? Give me a use case, kind of give me the rundown. And in this blog post as well, there is a no-code AI sheet sheet by AI Builder to kind of map out what you can do with it. So AI Builder is great for processing documents to process text and and do some um sentiment analysis on it. It can generate AI text and summarize, create drafts. It's very good with text and understanding sentiments and also analyzing images. So when I used it like 10 years ago, we used it to um uh um chihuahua or cookie to determine if it's dog or cookie. We fed it images of Chihuahua or something. Hot dog, not hot dog. Exactly. So dog or not dog or cookie or not cookie. Yeah. We also used it to detect uh graffiti out in the city. So we would take images of graffiti around also, and then we would put it into this folder and map it and and tell it to have something to reason over or to learn from. And we would tag it with different uh graffiti groups. And then we would we launch that to the public, and public could take images, upload it to this AI tool, and the AI tool would tell would map to the location that it was, and then also tell you which group it would be. And so you actually could get this grid of we didn't fulfill the project with a POC, but you could get this grid then of where do the different groups operate, at what time does new graffiti images come up or new graffiti comes up? And there's a whole lot of things around it for the the for the city of Asle to uh to kind of have a little bit of an overview. But this has grown a lot since then and it's a great tool. And I thank you, Marlene, for bringing our attention to some of these little bit under the radar forgotten gems in in the platform for sure.
NickYep. The the blog was the series is called What is This Tech and What Is It Used For? So if you're new to the Power Platform, this is a great, great place to start because I think sometimes the fundamentals get lost in the co-pilot mix. And even though this is AI, I think it had some of the licensing issues, was probably kind of what hindered it a little bit at first. But um, it's funny, she even links links to a few different blog posts and resources as well. Great post, Mullen. Keep up the good work. Looking forward to more.
SPEAKER_02And then speaking about licensing.
NickYeah, this was kind of a big one. It's generating a bit of chatter. So basically, the Power Apps per app license is being pulled from new users. So if you're a brand new project and you hope to use the Power Apps per app license, you have another two weeks where you can still buy this brand new. But then after that, for new customers, it's going away. The difference between the Power Apps per app license and the one that I think most people should be using, in my humble opinion, the Power Apps Premium license is the per app allows you your user to access one specific power app. Used to be two, but then they what they did is they halved the price and then limited it to one per app. So if you're in a corporation or an organization, you build one power app and your users have the per app license, then they can access that app, but they can't access anything else, any other power apps. So I mean it's great for an entry level. It's great if you have that one use case. But then for I think not double, but four. So I think it's
Agent Academy Sneak Peek And Workshop
Nicklike five dolls retail, translate that into whatever your local currency is, where a power apps premium license retail is $20. So four times the amount, but with a power apps premium, you can have an unlimited number of power apps. Your users can access multiple apps, integrated apps, the Outlook connector, all of these things, including even accessing a PowerPages site for if it's an internal site kind of thing. So it's going away. And then they're basically, if you so if you want to go in a, I think a, I don't even call it a low cost option, but it's pay as you go, meaning you just pay for the licensing that you're using, or you update to the Power Apps premium licensing. So I think a lot of people kind of got their hair on end a little bit thinking it's going away. It's not, from my understanding, from what I've read, it's not going away for existing customers. Existing customers, if they already have per apps licensing, they'll be able to continue to renew those, they'll be able to continue to reuse them. I understand they'll be able to even increase the numbers for time being anyway. But if you're a brand new customer, you won't be able to get it. It is uh definitely this is the evolving landscape of the power platform and licensing as it always is. There's not a lot of communication out of Microsoft beyond it changing the licensing guide. Because it's not a change to, it's not changing existing customers, that's kind of why they're holding back on any kind of big announcements. Understandably, they don't want to cause a panic, but I think sometimes not having enough information causes some panic or uncertainty. But that is also the Microsoft licensing in general. There's always uncertainty of what's really going on sometimes, and you're trying to always figure out what licensing you need or what you're entitled to and that kind of thing. So, yeah, that was sort of some news that kind of kind of quietly came out more through the community than from announcement from Microsoft because of the most up-to-date licensing guide that just got released like a few weeks ago, as it does every month, I believe.
SPEAKER_02Well, we've seen this trend for a long time because this hasn't been so when you've gone to powerapps.com to and kind of the the marketing page for PowerApps, the PowerApps Power App license hasn't been showcased at all for a while. So, and and also when the premium was announced, this was kind of a big deal than then we thought it was gonna go away and created a huge swarm around that, which is a a while back now. And it's like you said, they the answer to this is that yeah, you can go, you can get them through pay as you go still. So if you just give them access to that one app and they have pay as you go, you only pay for what you use, being kind of the the way to mitigate this, but also it's the communication around it that I think rubs people the wrong way the most. It happened very quickly and under the radar, and it wasn't like I said, it wasn't announced, and I think that's what people are reacting to more than anything, um, which is understandable. Cool. All right, very, very good. I just wanted to to touch quickly on something. You know the Cobalt Studio Academy that we are uh gonna do a workshop on?
NickYes.
SPEAKER_02Yes, so the and I this is just for our listeners, don't tell anyone else, but this is public online, but it's not being announced, so I can't really kind of say anything kind of big, but so I was on a partner call just this week, and then Scott Giroud presented a topic around code interpreter, and then he said,
ACDC, Minecraft Theme And Community Energy
SPEAKER_02This is the preview of content that's gonna be in the new commander version of the the academy. So it's kind of a preview thing, uh, and you can get access to it if you want, uh, but it's kind of under the radar. So I think they share the link. So if you want to get access to that and you're kind of waiting for the commander thing and you can't wait and you want to get some insights, then go to the the tech talks recording. They have all the recordings up online and and look through it and see what you can find, and then you can actually get a little sneak peek. So it's um we'll put a link to the recordings page on uh the show notes, and then you can find your way from there yourself. How's that?
NickRight. So and if you haven't started yet and you're looking to the Agent Academy and you you need to book some time, I highly recommend booking it for April at Color Cloud, where you and I are gonna walk through uh do this as a workshop.
SPEAKER_02So we're gonna do the recruiter part as a workshop, full day, you and me diving in. Oh, I can't wait. It's gonna be so much fun. Um and I also wanted to last before we go, wanted to shout out to Sharon Smith and Sandra Keel. We last time we talked about, or I had another rant um about it happens every so often, about presentation formats where I want to see, and now I know call for speakers for ePPC is almost up. Get your beeping sessions in, people. I'm on the content team, and um, I've set aside like my life for the next two weeks to go through the bazillion submissions that we get, and I want to see creativity and people thinking outside the box. And Sharon did a huge post where she quotes me. So she's been into the transcripts and she pulled all the things I said literally from this podcast last time. Put it into a LinkedIn post, which I'm I I freak out a little bit about, I must admit. I just don't know why. I just don't think about this being transcribed and put on the internet forever, and it freaks me out a little bit, but okay. But also, she put in a huge blog post and then she yeah. So, and we had a huge conversation about it there. So I love that. So thank you, Sharon, for picking up something we said and posting something else and then kind of dragging us into the conversation. I absolutely love it. Um and also shout out to Sandra, which I was introduced to this week. She's a big um Minecraft nerd, so now I can segue to your shirt. Why do you wear that Minecraft shirt, Nick?
NickWhy am I wearing that Minecraft shirt? So next week I will be traveling and participating uh on a team for the Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge, which of course the theme is Minecraft, which I think, if I remember correctly, we were having drinks in with the whole I somehow I invited myself to a dinner for the organizing team last summer or last spring. You guys were all thinking, oh, what are we gonna do? And like I just, I don't know, was it me or you that said, What about Minecraft? And then it kind of exploded, or or we were trying to find better ideas than My Little Pony, and Minecraft is one of them.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think I can blame you for this one because I had them convinced about My Little Pony, and then you came in with that idea, and then I when you said it, I was like, that is the best idea ever, because the Minecraft movie just came out and everyone's kind of raving on about it. It has kind of a new life. You get these waves of things, and Minecraft's very much can I go get something? Just hold on, just hold on. Okay. So now you can tell the people a joke while I'm getting something.
NickI don't have my dad joke book here. We have the ability to edit as well.
SPEAKER_02I know, but I keep on this one. Okay, are you ready?
NickOf course I'm ready. Yeah. Oh, that is so cool. That is so awesome.
SPEAKER_00So this little boy is going to follow though next week to be part of AT! Me and my kids made it.
NickThat's awesome. That's so cool.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so if anyone wonders what I'm doing when I'm not working and not recording this podcast, I'm making um Minecraft animals out of cardboard boxes and painting them.
NickOkay. I'd like to do that. So I would just say, like, yeah, that that's really cool. I spent my weekend actually uh getting, well, not I didn't spend the whole weekend. I spent a few hours and got a Minecraft server up and running on Azure and looking at the various APIs and MCP servers and all of these other things. And I got my in-house resident Minecraft expert to log in and check it out, get the thumbs up in terms of performance and everything because I am doing my MSDN subscription on my Azure, kind of keeping an eye on the credits. I think it cost me 15 cents an hour or something to run this Minecraft server. But yeah, um, and then met with the team on Friday. And yeah, pretty, pretty awesome. Pretty bunch, good uh good group of guys. So I think uh yeah, we got some ideas and some creativity flowing. So looking forward to that. So by the next episode will be the I think to be the Monday after. So maybe in a little rough shape, but we'll be able to report on the results of all that.
SPEAKER_02Or maybe actually we postpone it and we do a little recording at ACDC. How about that? That would be a lot of fun, though.
NickWell, yeah, we could do that too, for sure. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we could. And also I just wanted to say, because of course, we had a participating participation meeting this week to kind of get everyone involved and to to give all the information. Bring your bubble booksa and et cetera, et cetera. And also then, and then Joe Griffin's on the call and he's like, um, so uh will there be any? I expect there will be some Minecraft stuff going on. And I'm like, yeah, uh, there might be. And then actually we announced at that meeting that we have created, or rather, Scott Giro has created the management system where you claim your points for the whole hackathon inside Microsoft. No, sorry, Minecraft. I need to break. Inside Minecraft. So actually, every team needs to have at least one person in Minecraft to have a dedicated server. They've gotten bananas. I think he has all these kids who've made these. There's a church, there's
Creativity, Confidence And Closing CTA
SPEAKER_02a village, there's a thing. And then one of the other judges, Frederick, turns out he loves Minecraft. So he spent the last two weeks in there building a whole village. It's absolutely insane. And I'm like, and then we talk about these with people, and it keeps popping, people keep popping up in our community going, oh, I'm a Minecraft dad. I'm developing things all the time. I build a computer in Minecraft, I build a CP. It's like, what? Yeah. I did not know that Minecraft could do that. I don't know. Why don't we all just live in Minecraft? I'm like that at this point. I'm like, if I could, I would just, I would just, I would quit my job and I would just play Minecraft for a living. I absolutely love it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's me. Still working on survival. But uh yeah, but I'm getting there.
NickAwesome. No, it's cool. It's great. And so far, like even getting this server, like I had to brush off my Linux skills and everything, and just to get this up and running. And again, co-pilot helping me out along the way, kind of breaking those barriers down and um learning a ton. So looking forward to next week to dive into that and seeing a lot of friends and yeah, seeing what uh what crazy stuff we come up with.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And then also piggybacking a little bit on the thing we talked about last time. Does it enhance our creativity or does it reduce our creativity, creativity? And I think actually just us talking about this now enhances the fact that it does boost our creativity when we can play with all these things and it kind of lowers the barrier to for entry and it kind of lowers the threshold for everything. It makes it not so scary anymore. And then yeah, I am like you because I'm I'm buzzing. So yeah, can't wait! I'm so excited for to see you. You're gonna come here and it's gonna be so much fun.
unknownYep. Cool, cool.
SPEAKER_02All right, until next time, people, peace out and have fun with your Klingon and your Minecraft, and we'll see you next time.
unknownBye-bye.
SPEAKER_02Bye.
NickThank you for listening. If you like this episode, please make sure you share it with your friends and colleagues in the community. And be sure to leave a rating and 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 hosts, Lurika Akebeck and Nick Dolman. See you next time for your timely boost of Power Platform news and updates.
