Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2023 Release Wave 1 Plans

Yesterday (January 25, 2023), Microsoft release their plans for Microsoft Dynamics 2023 Release Wave 1. These release plans are available in various formats and can be accessed on the Microsoft Learn site, the Microsoft Release Planner or can be downloaded as PDFs.

Dialogs in Modern Command Bars

A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft announced the availability of displaying dialog boxes using the Power Fx function for modern Commanding. This new functionality provides the ability to have your Modern commanding component library show custom dialog boxes that can be customized to your needs, and respond to user action with Power FX.

Power Apps Named Formulas

Last Friday, September 16th, Microsoft introduced Name Formulas to Power FX. Named Formulas, and old concept that has been part of Microsoft Excel for a long time has now been brough to Power FX (currently experimental only). With Named Formulas we can simplify app initialization, reduce load time and logic and improve overall app maintenance

Power Apps Creator Kit – First Review

Late last month, the Microsoft Power Platform Customer Advisory Team (PowerCAT) released the Power Apps Creator Kit, which is a set of prebuilt controls and components to assist both citizen and professional developers in their journey of developing Canvas Apps and Custom Pages. In this post I will review a sample application that I created using some of these components.

Setting up the Power Apps Creator Kit

Whether you are new to developing Canvas Apps or are experienced, the Power Apps Creator Kit from the PowerCAT team has been a big talk in the community. The toolkit provides a list of pre-built controls and components that can be used to design and develop your Canvas Apps and Custom Pages.

Embedded Canvas App Performance Enhancements

In the last few months, I have been working on a migration project for a customer from a legacy system to Dataverse, and one of the functionalities included an embedded Canvas app containing multiple screens and quite a bit of functionality. The main issue that was encountered is that within some geographical regions it was taking a longer time than expected to load the app.

Co-Authoring in Canvas Apps

Late November last year, Microsoft released an experimental feature in Canvas apps to allow co-authoring, so that multiple users can work on the app at the same time. Currently, prior to this feature, if a user is working in Canvas Studio, any other user that will try to login to Canvas Studio will be blocked stating that it is locked by the previous user.

Power Platform 2021 Release Wave 2 Maker Portal Updates – Converged Apps

In preparation for our upcoming NYC BizApps event on October 27, 2021, and the Power Platform 2021 Wave 2 release (weekend of October 23/24), I am writing a series of blog posts related to some of the most sought after updates. In this post we will review the new converged apps.

Converged apps allows us to converge a Model-Driven App and a Canvas App into a single app. This does not change the ability to create standalone Canvas Apps, but only the ability to have them available in a single app. The link below details the changes that were announced at the end of July.