Power Platform Dev Weekly #258

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Apr 16, 2025

Welcome to the Power Platform Developers Weekly!

Vibe-coding is making lot of rounds these days. Nick Doelman has a post on this (see the Model Driven Apps & Dataverse section) and Scott Durow also showed how you can use SQL scripts to generate tables in the Data Workspace (see the Socials of the week section). Similarly, April Dunnam talks about how you can leverage vibe-coding but get the Power Platform guardrails to prevent mistakes – check out her post here. Vibe-coding is fun and you should try it out; but everything that is produced should be reviewed thoroughly before accepting the changes.

Microsoft feature releases and announcements

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🥇 Cover Story

Power Automate - The Super Switch

by David Wyatt

Keeping a Power Automate flow well structured is a personal bugbear of mine, so it’s great to see this article from David showing a different data-driven approach to controlling branching in a complex flow.

💎 Model Driven Apps & Dataverse

Self-Service Disaster Recovery for Power Platform and D365
by Andrew Ly
One of the great things about SaaS products in general is not having to worry about managing backups any longer, but if you haven’t tested your backups, do you really have them? Microsoft recently introduced the self-service disaster recovery option to allow you to perform a real failover to see how everything works in practise.

Let's Talk About Power Platform Managed Environments
by David Wyatt
Managed environments are an ever-growing collection of enhanced governance features. If you haven’t taken a look at them for a while, David has wrapped up a neat overview of what they include and why they might be useful for you.

Low-code is Dead. Long live Vibe Coding!
by Nick Doelman
I can’t seem to open LinkedIn without seeing so many posts about vibe-coding, either how it’s going to take over the world or destroy itself. In this more pragmatic article, Nick gives a useful illustration of how the approach could be applied to extending model driven apps.

Record ownership across Business Units: under the hood
by Riccardo Gregori
Riccardo jumps into the “Record ownership across Business Units” feature to see how this impacts things we’ve previously taken for granted with the standard security model.

😎 Power Automate

Comparison of 3th party document generation tools for Dynamics or Power Automate
by Elowy Groot
Need to generate some fancy documents from your data but the built in functions aren’t cutting it? There’s a good selection of third party addons to make your life easier, and Elowy has put together a handy comparison to help you choose.

Supercharge Custom Data Entity Extraction using Bring your Prompt with AI Builder
by Bala Madhusoodhanan
Combining the determinism of Power Automate with the power and flexibility of LLMs opens up whole new possibilities. In this article, Bala shows how to efficiently extract unstructured data from utility bills and get it ready for reporting.

🌎 Power Pages

Power Pages: Depending on jQuery
by Nicholas Hayduk
jQuery may be rather old by now, but it’s still a key part of Power Pages and has a rich ecosystem of plugins. But the way Power Pages includes both the main jQuery library and some core plugins can lead to some issues, and Nick has done the debugging for us!

👍 Everything else in Power Platform

Find Solution Dependencies Using AI & Visual Studio Code
by Chris Harper
If you’ve ever had an unhelpful error message importing a solution complaining about a missing dependency and you just get a guid to direct you to what’s missing, you’ve felt the same pain as Chris. Here he shows how to go digging in your solution to get some more helpful information about what’s missing and how to resolve it.

Continuous Integration and Deployment for Dynamics 365 CRM with Azure DevOps Pipelines
by Sam Kumar
There are several options for building automated pipelines to make your deployments more repeatable, and in this article Sam shows how to use Azure DevOps together with the Power Platform tools to move your solution between environments.

Adventures with Power Platform: Deployment Struggles
by Matt Ruma
Keeping on the dependency and deployment pipelines theme, Matt shows how to diagnose and resolve an issue with the Power Platform Pipelines feature after deleting a Power Automate flow.