PowerPlatform | Powerful Devs recap

I recently joint the Powerful Devs event as part of my #NeverStopLearning initiative, actually part of #LowCodeFebruary too and upskill my knowledge around the latest and greatest achievements around the toolchain for developers. Today I´d like to recap on my favorites and invite yours to share your perspectives as well. But first, if you had missed this opportunity, you can still watch the content on demand and even have a deep dive to the content shared by wonderful April Dunnam sharing the slides with all of you here.

Toolchain for developers / Personal background

With recent additions and noise around AI boostering software development, I wasn´t sure about what Power Platform these days would have to offer as a true benefit for me being a professional developer for years. And for those not knowing me: I started my career being a C# and JavaScript software developer, spent some time in the web publishing world with HTML, DHTML, CSS, php & Co. before stepping back into what today is known for Dynamics 365 developing plug-ins, transforming my JavaScript into TypeScript knowledge and transforming my HTML & CSS skills into React and Fluent UI frameworks (just to name a few). 6yrs back, I was then lucky to be offered a job at Microsoft to become a Technical Specialist around Field Services for EMEA in a team called Global Blackbelts, before I joint the Power Platform team as Sr. Technical Specialist to drive the go-to-market strategy and help building and growing this market. So you may say, I am an early adopter as I was lucky to start with CRM 1.2 and knowing Power Apps before it became part of the Power Platform.

The biggest change beside the big AI infusion we currently see growing, is the maturity and lightning speed of low code Power Platform tools innovating and transforming the way of developing apps or improving processes. The way of me prototyping an app or process design and inspiring other makers to drive developer velocity has massively changed. Comparing today with the days of using web resources, JavaScript, CSS and other methods to transform the look and feel of CRM UI into an XRM solution.

Nevertheless, a critical part for me knowing about the importance of commenting your code, taking care of versioning and ensuring bug testing and fixing plus delivering a smooth deploying process, I always looked carefully on what Power Platform would allow me for in those cases. I bet, many of yours might feel the same or being in the same position here.

Fusion Teams

I´ve talked about the importance of Fusion Teams before, but for me the examples given during the Powerful Devs event reminded me of my early days as a Dynamics developer and working in development teams on plug-ins and other stuff. April and Scott Durow provided a great example of where Fusion Teams improves the innovation that is driven based on easy but secured data access and an engine called Dataverse driving further improvements.

Above you can find the example highlighted by Scott and a Pro-Developer working on a Fusion Teams Development would quickly boost the productivity of a low-code developer working on a Power Apps app or Power Automate process logic. Some of the additional „boosters“ I´ve been sharing earlier with you here.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)

The obvious goal of ALM for low code developers (or any developer) would be to make them using ALM, without them knowing using it. ALM is something which takes a longer learning curve and for many low code projects you would even request if a complex backend of ALM would be needed to quickly deploy a solution for the issue. So what´s the maturity level here with Power Platform? Kartik and Casey presented an update on this story which really showed how fast the team improved based on feedback of the Power Platform community.

And while not yet finished (if ever) the capabilities offered within Power Platform to allow for ALM improved massively during the course of the last two years. If you haven´t seen or recently used any of the tools available, it´s worth checking out this session.

The road ahead doesn´t only look promising, it makes me feel confident that I don´t have to teach a business technologist the basics of ALM or implement an assessment process for maker projects that would slow down their innovation, simply because of a DevOps team would ask for using ALM on a specific project.

Nevertheless, I think an important step for any developer using Power Platform is to learn more about the possible ingredients of them creating a solution.

Above simplified visual of such ingredients shared during the even would give you an example of what I mean by teaching a business technologist about all this.

Wrap up

Knowing and being part of both the Dynamics and Power Platform community for quite a while now, it´s hard to step-up with all the changes and improvements that are almost introduced every other month. Sometimes, it even feels faster like this. It shows the massive transformation ongoing in the way of future software development. As a short anecdote: I was sitting in a customer hackathon, mentoring a team while them building a solution with Power Apps. During the event, the UI of Power Apps Maker Studio changed and left navigation became customizable.

A new generation expecting a lot of things being available out of the box, disqualifying tools rapidly if not finding a fit for their needs. To provide an almost consistent ecosystem to develop, co-develop, learn and improve or provide a complete toolchain seems a massive task. Nevertheless, by adding low code to this with Power Platform and democratizing access to data, AI/ML and other improvements, the cloud seems to become the limit.

Would be interest to know about your thoughts from Powerful Devs. Until then,…