I had the opportunity to attend two of Microsoft’s major conferences this year in person: in May, Microsoft Build; and in November, Microsoft Ignite. While primarily I was there to run my company’s sponsored booth, I did attend the keynotes and deeply reviewed the Book of News with all of the announcements.  People were joking that the conferences should be renamed “Microsoft Copilot Conference”. Both times. Heads were almost spinning with all the new Copilot announcements, and immediately the efforts started to make sense of what this means for developers, and what this means for busines ..read more

It’s high time to write about one of my favorite subjects in canvas apps: animation! For users who interact with visual interfaces, animation and moving images surround us in our digital lives. From humble beginnings of very pixelated animated GIFs cluttering the front pages of Web 1.0 sites, today animation has become an integral part of the modern digital visual experience. I am accustomed to seeing them on every computer program and mobile app, on websites and in slideshow presentations, lighting up loading screens and pop-up menus. At this point, sometimes I find it more jarring to experie ..read more

It’s time to talk about Delegation. Delegation is a critical concept in Power Apps: building canvas apps is all about bringing together data across the myriad connectors, so naturally getting all of the expected data for your Power Fx logic to ingest or end users to browse is core to a good app. However, I often see Delegation— *ahem*— relegated to advanced trainings only, or even skipped altogether. Although it is complicated, this topic is something that citizen developers need to master the same as pro developers. When I give my intro to canvas apps lesson to new app makers, I tell them ..read more

Just a quick post for you here in case you were missing your regularly-scheduled Joy of Power Apps content! It’s been a busy summer of house buying, subsequent house renovation and decoration projects, and trying to sneak in some time off here and there. I’ve got some great content in the works for future posts this fall, so stay tuned! In the meantime, head on over to Mark Smith’s Power Platform Show podcast to hear an interview with me about canvas apps. Topics include: My personal journey into technology, Dynamics and the Power Platform How I re-evaluated my position on Power Apps to becom ..read more

As a long-time CRM business analyst, I’ve used the D365 bulk import wizard many, many times to import new and updated data into what is now Microsoft Dataverse. (I have given so many trainings to colleagues and clients that I could probably recite my Bulk Import script verbatim.) As CRM features go, it’s fairly ancient, which translates into a multi-step, click-heavy process full of twists and wrong turns that can lead users to inadvertent data loss through a VLOOKUP-gone-bad— or at least, a report full of import errors to sort through. And so, I’ve been patiently waiting for the next-gen bulk ..read more

Before you continue— make sure you read through an honest guide to canvas app offline (part 1) first! There you will find a basic guide to the offline expression pattern, advice on the proper development approach, a step-by-step guide to loading in all your data via Power Automate, and a first set of recommendations on whether or not to built out offline capability. We’re now ready to dive into the practical application of offline architecture. How do we keep track of data modifications? What about synchronizing changes to the server? How do we efficiently test and debug offline code? Look out ..read more

I have found the topic of offline capability in canvas apps to be a bit of a black box: search for it online, and you will find a number of articles, posts and forum messages that are mere variations of the official Microsoft documentation. A basic guide, using a rather absurd example (honestly, who requires Twitter post capability when offline?), to the correct expressions and syntax to make offline work. Microsoft hasn’t released a detailed blog about canvas offline since 2018, and I haven’t seen much out there about real-life scenarios which took a production canvas app offline. Friends, I ..read more

Recently, I had cause to follow my own advice when partnering with a colleague on a canvas app we’re building out for a client. He often brings me head-scratcher problems where the reality of Power Apps and the App Studio doesn’t quite meet the requirements or wireframe designs we had planned out. It’s fun to put our heads together to troubleshoot and figure out a solution or workaround. (Quick shoutout— David, you’re awesome!) In this case, he was implementing a quick shadow effect for a side menu. Although my first response was to point him to my walkthrough in achieve next-level app design ..read more

In my experience, the more canvas apps you create, the better you want them to look. And the more you advance in creating those visually appealing canvas apps, the more likely you are to hit a hard limitation or two with your visual design. Capabilities you expect would be natively available, like rich custom fonts, color gradients and element drop-shadows, are curiously unavailable through no-code means. We’ve had those in Microsoft Office for decades! just a few of the options from PowerPoint I would love to see made available in the canvas App Studio For the citizen developer, these li ..read more

If you read through part 1 of the style & theme options series, then you may have come to the conclusion that a Style Guide Screen is not the method you want to use to add a custom color theme to your canvas apps, since you may be concerned about the cross-screen linking performance issue. As we explore a few other options in part 2, another area of concern is how flexible the color theme is to future changes. Let’s review an example using the style guide screen from part 1. flexibility: another consideration When I put together the style guide screen, I set all of the following propert ..read more