Focused Views for all entities

Focused views, which was originally introduced as part of the Dynamics 365 Sales app allows viewing and managing records and their associated activities on a single page. It provides the ability to not navigate back and forth between screens.

Pipeline and Solution updates in Power Platform 2024 Release Wave 1

In the last few weeks there have been various updates to Pipelines and Solutions in the Power Platform and Power Apps as part of the 2024 Release Wave 1. In this post, I will provide an overview of these three updates and links to additional information about each of these.

Changes to Release channels for model-driven apps

Microsoft provides new and updated features for model-driven apps on a regular basis. Until recently, those feature updates were rolled out in two release waves called the semi-annual release waves, which is the default setting for all of the existing apps and environments.

Masking sensitive data in Dataverse

As part of the 2024 Power Platform Release Wave 1, Microsoft has released (currently in Public Preview) the ability to create secured fields and mask either all or parts of the field based on regular expressions. This would allow us to show parts of the secured fields (such as the last 4 digits of a social security number) on the form without having to deal with custom scripts and not having the ability to export the full data of those fields.

Blocking unmanaged customizations in Dataverse

Today, Wednesday, December 14th, 2024m Microsoft announced the preview of blocking unmanaged customizations in your environments. This new feature will prevent users from making unmanaged changes in the test and production environments as well as restrict the import of unmanaged solutions into production.

Complex Exporting to Excel using Power Automate

While working on a recent project to replace a low code platform with the Power Platform, one of the requirements that we had was to replace some of the Excel export and import functionalities that the existing system had to be able to send large Excel files into various other systems to be analyzed and consumed.

Calling Dataverse actions directly in Power Fx

Until recently, if we wanted to call a bound or unbound action from a Canvas app, we would have to create a Power Automate flow that would be triggered from the Canvas App and would then call a bound or unbound action from Power Automate. Not any more…

Cards for Power Apps are solution aware

Although cards for Power Apps were made Generally Available in March 2023, they were not available from within solutions, which made the deployment process more complex. Last week, on November 2nd, Microsoft announced that Cards for Power Apps have become solution aware.

Standard vs Virtual PCF Controls

A while back (April of last year) Microsoft introduced the concept of Virtual PCF components. Although there are a lot of benefits of using this new type of component adoption does not seem to be too high. When looking at the components that are available in the pcf gallery for example, the majority of the components are still Standard

New table creation experience in Maker Portal

The table creation experience in the Maker Portal has been somewhat slow, but now Microsoft has released some new features (in GA) that will make the creation of tables easier and more versatile, including uploading tables from Microsoft Excel or conversation-based table creation powered by Copilot.