Category: Development (Page 1 of 5)

Self-Service Disaster Recovery for Power Platform and D365

April 14, 2025 / Andrew Ly

Microsoft provides Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) across all production environments as part of the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform offerings. This aims to minimize outages and disruptions and ensure that your data is protected at all times.

Infrastructure is deployed to an Azure Geography, and a geography is made up of between 2 to 3 Azure Availability Zones (generally located 300 miles / 482 kms away from each other). An Azure Availability Zone deploys critical data center infrastructure such as network, power, and cooling. To ensure resilience across a geography, your environments are replicated across to at least two Availability Zones in real time.

The diagram shows a typical architecture of a geography that serves a single or multiple countries/regions.

Figure 1 – Example of Azure Geography and Availability Zones

If a failure is detected within an availability zone, disaster recovery will route traffic to the unaffected availability zone. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is stated to be near zero, and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is stated to be less than 5 minutes.

As part of Wave 1 Release 2025, Microsoft released Self-Service Disaster Recovery for Power Platform as a public preview.

Today we’ll be further exploring this capability by running a Disaster Recovery Drill.

Power Platform Update Guide for Administrators

Navigating Updates: Your Guide to Microsoft Power Platform Updates

April 2, 2025 / Andrew Ly

This article provides a high-level overview of managing updates for the Microsoft Power Platform and Dynamics 365. It is important to stay informed about the latest updates and understanding the different types of updates that are deployed to ensure platform stability and minimize disruptions.

New features, optimisations, bug fixes, deprecations, and security patches are constantly being deployed, making this guide essential for anyone whose role involves managing Power Platform environments. It covers both new and existing information that is crucial for effective management.

In this article I will be focusing on four core concepts:

Release Wave Updates – Major updates to the Power Platform service that are generally available twice per year in April and October. These updates are deployed automatically.
Early Access Updates – Updates designed for testing functionality in test environments, available ahead of the automatic wave updates. These updates are deployed manually.
Refresh Cadence (Incremental Updates) – Updates that occur between Wave Release cycles and can be deployed weekly or monthly. These updates occur automatically.
Release Channels (for Model Driven Apps) – Semi Annual (twice yearly) or Monthly updates to the Unified Interface that drives Model Driven Power Apps.

Enhancing Copilot Conversations in Model-Driven Power Apps using Copilot Studio

January 11, 2025 / Andrew Ly

Today we’re going to be having a quick look at how we can extend and enhance the Copilot capabilities within Model Driven Power Apps.

This is new preview release functionality and the documentation will be available on Microsoft’s website here:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/maker/model-driven-apps/customize-copilot-chat

In this video, we’ll look at two scenarios for a fictional Fitness Club. It will focus on using knowledge based search to find relevant information for a member, as well as helping us qualify if a member is eligible for a seniors discount.

Using Power Automate to manage Dataverse File/Image Column Types

May 1, 2024 / Andrew Ly

Microsoft Dataverse has several ways of managing file attachments, one of which is File or Image Column types. In this blog post, I will discuss how we can use Power Automate to overcome some of the challenges in creating automation that manages content stored within Dataverse File and Image Column Types.

Using SQL Stored Procedures within PowerApps via PowerFX

March 26, 2024 / Andrew Ly

Customers can now call stored procedures in Power Automate without incurring performance penalties, leading to improved efficiency in action-based apps.

Feature Details:

Direct Stored Procedure Calls: Customers can utilize Power Fx to directly call stored procedures, eliminating the need for additional steps.
Seamless Integration: Adding a SQL Server Database object to their data sources enables customers to access Stored Procedures actions directly from the database object.
Performance Optimization: This feature helps customers avoid performance hits during app initialization by calling Power Automate. Additionally, it reduces the need to move data in and out of collections, resulting in better overall data call and update performance.

Overview of Third-Party Form Builder (Voice of Customer) Applications that Integrate with Dynamics 365/Power Platform

January 11, 2024 / Andrew Ly

Clients often ask me if it is possible to integrate third-party form builder applications with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the broader Power Platform. The short answer to that question is yes. However, there are a number of considerations to be made when choosing which is the right form builder application for your deployment.

Power Apps Figma UI Kit – A Year in Review and Future of Express Design

December 29, 2022 / Andrew Ly

Introduction

Figma is a software company that offers an innovative, collaborative design and prototyping tool. It allows designers and teams to create, prototype, and share designs for websites, mobile apps and other digital products.

In May 2022, Microsoft announced plans to integrate with Figma, the collaborative design tool, when they introduced Microsoft’s Express Design. This enabled auto-generating apps from Figma files and other image files.

Convert Figma files, PDFs, paper forms, and hand drawn sketches into apps with express design in Power Apps.

According to Ryan Cunningham (VP, Power Apps) more than half of the people using AI to generate apps from images or designs are new to the platform, and more than a third of all makers are getting AI-powered suggestions in Power Apps today.

How does Integration work?

jsPDF PCF Implementation Walkthrough

July 8, 2022 / Andrew Ly

jsPDF is a handy library to generate PDF documents from text. There are a number of simple to advanced features of this library, that include formatting (fonts, margins, paper sizes, etc) through to compression as well as password encryption options.

Initially I thought that jsPDF could be a great option to extend portals by allowing customers to quickly generate a bill (on the fly) whilst reducing storage costs by not keeping historical invoices, but then I discovered that the jsPDF framework is capable of a lot more. I recommend that you read through the jsPDF documentation when you have a moment (https://artskydj.github.io/jsPDF/docs/jsPDF.html), as mentioned earlier there are many many options available in jsPDF.

In this video, I’ll walk you through how to create a simple PCF implementation of jsPDF, which we’ll bind to a text field and trigger the generation of the PDF document from a button.

Source code:

https://github.com/365lyf/PCFControls/tree/master/jsPDF

Power Platform Release Wave 1 2022 – What’s new in Power Apps

April 1, 2022 / Andrew Ly

With the upcoming Microsoft Power Platform 2022 Release Wave 1, I wanted to provide a guide to the community on the upcoming feature enhancements that will help make a difference in your deployments. The intention is to provide rolling commentary across the next couple of weeks with a focus on each of the major products within the Power Platform, continuing with today with Power Automate.

If you missed the previous article on Power BI and Power Automate, you read my summary here.

Microsoft Power Apps 2022 Wave 1 release brings about significant enhancements across all areas of Power Apps Model, Canvas and Portals. The core themes of this release, in my opinion, are Platform Enhancements (either previously previewed features, or exciting new features such as Branded Apps), and Collaboration (Co-Presence, Co-Edit for example).

Here’s a hot take on some of the features included in this release.

Power Platform Release Wave 1 2022 – Top 10 Power Automate Features

February 3, 2022 / Andrew Ly

With the upcoming Microsoft Power Platform 2022 Release Wave 1, I wanted to provide a guide to the community of the upcoming feature enhancements that will help make a difference in your deployments. My intention is to provide rolling commentary across the next couple of weeks with a focus on each of the major products within the Power Platform, continuing with today with Power Automate.

If you missed my previous article on Power BI, you can read it here.

An early peek of Microsoft Power Automate 2022 Wave 1 release it shows that there have been significant enhancements in respect to Usability, Security and Monitoring.

Here is my top 10 new features that you should be across in this release.