Company Blog Microsoft

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about changes on the creation of Application Users and the ability to manage this via the Power Platform Admin Center. Not much time has passed, and a few additions have been added to the Admin Center, which allows to manage Users, Teams and Security Roles. We are still missing some functionality to reach parity with the classic interface, but we are on our way.

In the last few days, Microsoft made some big announcements related to new features that are not available in public preview. These are the Public Preview of Custom Pages for converging mode-driven apps and canvas apps as well as the command designer for model-driven apps with Power FX (which is still in preview).

I have been working with a client for the past year or so, where they have been using the Data Export Service to write data from their Dataverse environment to an Azure hosted SQL Server.

The Data Export service, for anyone who is not aware is a Microsoft solution that uses the Data Export Framework that allows the moving of data from Microsoft Dynamics 365/Dataverse to an Azure SQL Server (whether running on an Azure VM, Azure SQL or an Azure Managed instance). This solution works without the requirement for any custom development or SQL Server Integration Services.

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.

In my last blog post of this year, I decided to write about creating Nested Galleries in Canvas Apps. There are probably various blogs and videos of this already, but I thought of simplifying this, as it seems to be a common request.

Let’s go ahead and start by creating a new tablet-form factor canvas app, and use the blank app template. We can specify the name, icon and screen orientation. In this case, I set it as Landscape orientation and set the size to 16:9 (Default). I also added the header to make it look a little prettier.

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.

As Microsoft is still making changes to connection references, I have been trying to get it to work with a service principal account, and account a few interesting points that are important for anyone who will be developing and deploying Power Automate flows using the Service Principal Connection reference.

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.