Blogs Integration

With everything that is going on around ALM and CI/CD and how to implement an automated deployment process with Azure Dev Ops of Github actions, there are still many organizations that have a lot of work that needs to be done before they can turn the switch over.

In this post, I will show how we can use Power Automate Cloud flows to initiate an Azure DevOps Pipeline, and in turn use a Canvas App to call the flow that will call the Azure DevOps pipeline.

To start the year, I would like to review Adaptive Cards, where last summer I had a Power Storm session with a couple of my fellow MVPs, Alex Shlega and Linn Zaw Win to get a little more familiarized with using Adaptive Cards, adding them to Cloud flows and Microsoft Teams, and sending adaptive cards via Outlook. About 5 months passed since then, and now I had the need to build something for a project that I am working on.

Recently, while working on some requirements, I noticed that one of the solutions that the company implemented was to replicate the Azure Groups and Members from AD into their Dataverse environment. This seemed to me to be unnecessary, but sometimes due to security restrictions, this might be the only way.

In this article, I review the required steps of building and deploying your Power Apps solution from your Development environment to your test and production environments. We will add a approval trigger from Test to Prod, Unpack the solution and publish your managed solution as an artifact so that it can be used to import to the higher environments.

There are various organizations that for whatever reason, whether it be trust or security are not comfortable using the Microsoft-hosted agents, and would like to use self-hosted agents within their own corporate environment.

In this article, I will go through the steps of creating a self-hosted agent, and then configuring a pipeline that will move your solution between the different environments.

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about embedding a Canvas App in a Model Driven form, and compared the options of whether, in my case I should have embedded the app using the Canvas App control, or as we implemented using an iframe on the form.

In this blog post I will review the recent announcement from Microsoft Ignite, where we saw first hand Project Oakdale, or Power Apps within Microsoft Teams. The post will show you how to enable Power Apps within your teams tenant, and how to start working on your first app.

I have been working in the Government space for a few years now, and most implementations of the Dynamics and Azure tenants and environments are hosted in the Government Cloud. This means that there are a lot of restrictions that we have to deal with, not only from Microsoft but also from the internal IT policies.

Last Friday, while working with one of our clients on an integration issue between Dynamics and the Microsoft Exchange global address book, he asked me if there was a way for them to have automated creation of events (calendar items) in their Microsoft Outlook calendar where the source of the data was an Excel spreadsheet in OneDrive. This is a short post, but might help someone out who needs to implement this.

Since the announcement by Microsoft at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit last month, and even before, I’ve been eager to take a look at the new SQL Connection for the Common Data Service Endpoint. What this means is that we can not write and execute SQL queries against the entity data.

In order to get started, the first thing that has to be done is enabling the Endpoint, so that we can create a connection from SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) to our Dynamics/CDS environment. As of now, there are two ways to enable this endpoint.