Category: PowerApps (Page 1 of 2)

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.

Dataverse Long Term Data Retention

February 4, 2024 / Andrew Ly

What is Dataverse Long Term Data Retention?

Currently in Public Preview (Q1 2024), Dataverse Long Term Data Retention allows your organisation to archive data to long term storage. But what exactly does this mean?

This means that you can achieve a number of goals:

Reduce your overall Dataverse Database Capacity (more on this later)
Have more control over data that will only primarily be used for auditing or occasional read-only access. It is designed as an interim stage between having live data, and deleted data. Microsoft calls this ‘retained data’.
The ability to query retained data on demand.
Build long term retention policies that will work within your ALM, meaning that you can define as a solution layer and carry your long term retention policies between your higher environments.

Note, that this feature should only be enabled in non-production environments for testing purposes at this stage (see Known Issues).

How do I set up Long Term Data Retention?

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?

Figma UI Kit for Microsoft Power Apps Walkthrough

July 20, 2022 / Andrew Ly

Microsoft released support for Figma design files in 2022 and allows you to create Power App screens (both tablet and mobile) with pre-defined Power App controls (e.g. Scrollable sections, labels, controls, colours, etc).

Today I’ll do a quick run-through demonstrating how you can quickly create Power App screens using the toolkit and how to import into your Power Apps environment .

Power Platform 2021 H1 – 6 Announcements You Should Know About

June 20, 2021 / Andrew Ly

I hope everyone in the community is staying safe and their families are well. 2021 has been a year of many stops and starts, but one thing that keeps moving forward is the evolution of the Microsoft Power Platform. As we approach the midpoint of the year, I feel as though now is a good time to reflect upon the announcements made at both the Microsoft Business Applications Summit (MBAS) and Microsoft Build.

In this blog, I will quickly cover the top 6 features announced so far this year that will change the way you implement and use the Power Platform.

PCF Control – Build your own Icons with Notifications

October 8, 2020 / Andrew Ly

Icons with Notifications are used heavily in app development to provide navigation and context within the same screen. In this PCF article, I will provide a walkthrough on how you can implement a PCF control for both Canvas and Model that enable you to build a navigation bar with icons.

Big Year Ahead for UX in Power Platform and Dynamics 365

January 28, 2020 / Andrew Ly

Today the NDA is lifted on 2020 Release Wave 1 for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.

In this blog I will be covering the User Experience (UX) enhancements within this release focusing particularly on the new visualisations, user interface improvements, and extensibility of controls across Model-Driven, Canvas, Mixed Reality, and Portals.

How to use Mock-Up Data in PCF CLI (July Update 2019)

August 1, 2019 / Andrew Ly

The updated PCF CLI tooling has just been released (July 2019), and one major enhancement is supporting mock datasets (Your Data within PCF Test Harness).

How to Create Buttons with Icons within PCF (using Font-Awesome)

July 17, 2019 / Andrew Ly

I’ve noticed that people in the PowerApps community have been having trouble using image resources within their custom PCF controls, so I thought I would look at a simple but novel approach for customizing your buttons and icons.

If you aren’t familiar with font-awesome they let you search from a catalog of great looking icons that you embed within your web apps.

In the following example, I created three buttons which have their own font-awesome icons. This was achieved by doing two things