Every now and then I get asked why someone should use managed solutions. We also had a discussion internally recently because some of our projects have problems with it. The same discussion came up in the Power Platform Level Up discord. This blog post tries to summarize those discussions and give insights to a broader audience. If you are not part of the Power Platform Level Up discord I highly recommend doing it. It’s an open Server for Power Platform developers. There are always great discussions and insights. During the mentioned discussions I gathered a list of arguments for and against m ..read more

Microsoft is investing a lot in advancements in the overall Application Lifecycle Management process and capabilities. One area they already made a lot of improvements is the Solution import time. In this blog post, we will discuss how this improved solution import time can be achieved. Background As mentioned Microsoft has improved the import time when it is done with the correct configuration. At one customer project, I was able to get our import down from usually 60 minutes to around 5 min. What we have to do is use managed solutions and do an Update as well as have both “ConvertToManaged ..read more

A few weeks ago I saw a message in the M365 Message Center regarding “Non-compliant” flows. Unfortunately, I can’t find the message any longer, but it was pretty concerning because it looked like a lot of flows could be turned off during the summer holiday season. Therefore I am making this attempt to explain the upcoming licensing enforcement in Power Automate. This whole topic created some uncertainty and discussion between my colleagues, customers and other people within the community. During the last couple of weeks, I had some discussions with both Microsoft and other people from the comm ..read more

As I described in one of my previous posts (Explaining “One Version” – Dynamics MDA) Microsoft is releasing two “Waves” of new functionalities and improvements per year. Today, 2023-07-18, Microsoft has published the Release Notes for the Release 2023 Wave 2. Like the last time, it is overall a quite huge “document”. This blog post is a “curated” summary of the Release 2023 Wave 2 release notes. You can find them under the following links: Power Platform Dynamics 365 In this blog post, I try to summarize the Release Notes and highlight the features I find most interesting or impactful ..read more

In the last couple of weeks/months, I found myself explaining Connections and Connection References to several colleagues as well as community members while having conversations with them. Usually, questions about them came up along with other stuff we talked about. This made me think it might be interesting for the wider community to get Connections and Connection References explained. So here is another article in my “series” on stuff explained. Basics Let’s talk about the basics first and take a look at what Connections and Connection References are. Connections A connection contains all th ..read more

With the rising number of citizen developers, I thought it might be time to write a blog post explaining Dataverse Solutions. When developing/configuring within Dataverse one question comes up pretty soon How do I get my changes from one environment to another That’s where Solutions come into the picture. Let’s see what they are good for and what the dos and don’ts are. Basics Let’s talk a bit about the basics of a Solution What is it? A Solution is basically just a container that bundles a list of components. When a component is added to a solution a pointer to the component will be created ..read more

One of our current projects is the migration of an onPrem Dynamics 365 to the Cloud. Part of that is refactoring existing JavaScript implementation. The current implementation had an onSave function which prevented the save process based on a call to the WebAPI. It took me some time to migrate the function, therefore I thought it might be interesting for others to know how to write an async onSave preventDefault with external call. Background All calls to the WebAPI (through Xrm.WebApi) are done async in the Power Platform. This means if you need to get additional data to determine whether you ..read more

One of my colleagues recently approached me regarding a requirement she had. In one of our customer projects, we needed to show a subgrid with information from a table two relations away. In this blog post, we will learn how to create a read-only nested editable grid in dataverse. Problem As mentioned one customer had the requirement to show information from a table two relationships away. This can be achieved by using the editable grid. Unfortunately, as the name says, the subgrid get’s editable. In this case, the requirement was to only show information and not to make it editable directly o ..read more

Över two years ago I wrote about how to “create and fill an Excel file dynamically using Power Automate“. I recently had a similar use case again. I discovered Office Script (Thanks to Tomasz Poszytek (LinkedIn, Twitter, Blog) for mentioning it to me), which I found to be a much easier way of manipulating Excel fills than doing everything in Power Automate. Therefore I decided to recreate the use case of my previous post using Office Script. What is Office Script? Office Script is basically a TypeScript snipped which can be run against any Excel file. There are some specific functions one can ..read more

I recently had the challenge of exporting Dataverse data to an SQL Database. I ended up using an Azure Data Lake Gen2 in combination with an Azure Data Factory (ADF). Throughout the process of setting it up, I faced some issues. We will discuss those in this blog post. Parts of the shown implementation are in preview as of writing this article. Disclaimer The solution shown in this post will have a price impact. DES is a solution which was/is included in your Power Platform license. Both Azure Data Lake Gen2 as well as Azure Data Factory do have extra costs. Espacially Azure Data Factory pipel ..read more