Power Platform Weekly - Issue #213
Welcome to Power Platform Weekly!
Last week the Power Apps March Feature Update was summarized and the Copilot Studio features released in March were presented. The General Availability of Agent Flows in Copilot Studio was announced.
The data entry agent in model-driven apps was highlighted and the Process Map in Power Automate Public Preview was announced.
🎉Microsoft 50 years! 🎉 What an incredible journey! Who better to reflect on it than Bill Gates himself, celebrate 50 years of Microsoft with the company’s original source code.
Have a great week and thanks for reading!
📰 Articles
PCF: Direct embedding of Controls into SiteMap
👩💻 Andrew Butenko found a seemingly unsupported but native way to embed PCF controls directly into SiteMap. Read as he shares a few cool tricks he learned from first-party apps.
Embracing AI with Microsoft Copilot
🦸🏻♀️ So, you’ve heard all the noise about Microsoft Copilot, and you’re wondering what the fuss is. Is it just Clippy on steroids? Or is it actually useful for something beyond writing “Happy Monday, hope you’re well” emails? Let’s have a wee look with Mark Christie.
Using Map file in ALM
👩💻 To ensure a healthy code state, a developer needs to ensure that every part of the implementation that is deployed to downstream environments is healthy. Within the Power Platform we can, for example, use map files in ALM. This blog post by Benedikt Bergmann will explain what map files are and how we can use it.
Other articles
🦸🏻♀️ Dynamics 365 Sales Goals by Angeliki Patsiavou
👩💻 Color Match Game for Kids, Written in Power Apps by Clavin Fernandes
🦸🏻♀️ Finally there, hide a choice column value, or not? by Jeroen Scheper
🦸🏻♀️ Formatted List Of Speaker Profiles For Event | Realtime by Megan V. Walker
🦸🏻♀️ Enabling Real Time Alerts using Microsoft Graph in Power Platform – Part 1 by Mohamed Ashiq Faleel
🦸🏻♀️ Balancing Automation and Human Touch in Generative AI IVR by Peter Ruiter
👩💻 Debug PCFs using a Browser Autoresponder Extension (MDA & Canvas Apps) by Diana Birkelbach
🦸🏻♀️ Think outside the Bot - did Copilot just become smarter? by Sebastian Sieber
🦸🏻♀️ Power Automate Copy Files From Network Drive To SharePoint by Matthew Devaney
📺 Videos
🎙️ Podcasts
Run As Radio Podcast
👩💻 What can GitHub Copilot do for SysAdmins in 2025? Richard talks to Jessica Deen from GitHub about her experiences using Copilot for her work. Jessica talks about Copilot being the first stop for most tasks - describing the task to Copilot helps you think through the problem, and often the tool can generate code or information to get that task done fast. Today's GitHub Copilot can handle everything from explaining existing code to writing something new, debugging a problem, or even writing documentation!
Cloud Architects Podcast
👩💻 At Microsoft Ignite 2024, we sat down with our old friend Anthony Bartolo to discuss the industry’s shift from traditional infrastructure roles to development, a transition heavily influenced by AI and automation.
As companies increasingly adopt "vibe coding" — the trend where developers focus on rapid prototyping and intuition-driven coding rather than rigid syntax — Anthony’s journey is a perfect example of how infrastructure professionals are embracing this new paradigm. He shared his experience moving from network engineering to full-stack development, and how AI tools helped bridge knowledge gaps. This aligns with vibe coding’s emphasis on leveraging AI-assisted development to lower entry barriers, allowing generalists to build functional applications without deep technical expertise. The discussion highlighted how AI is democratizing software creation, empowering both infrastructure specialists and non-traditional coders to build solutions quickly. While AI lowers the barrier to entry, it also raises questions about shallow expertise and long-term sustainability. Are we building real solutions or just stitching together AI-generated snippets with no real understanding?
📅 Events & Webinars
ColorCloud Hamburg 2025
(📅 April 24, 2025)
ColorCloud is back in 2025! After the highly successful first edition, the new edition is happening in April 2025. Again, it will be a great event for everyone who likes Power Platform, Dynamics 365, Azure & Power BI.
Power Summit – Power Platform Developer Community Bootcamp
(📅 May 24, 2025)
Power Summit is the Largest Free Power Platform & A.I. Community Conference in the United Kingdom, celebrating our 10-year anniversary in teaching low code development & A.I. to solve your organisational challenges. Power Summit aims to demystify the complexities of A.I. and Power Platform development using fun & creative learning techniques inspired from Lego and Star Wars to provide a fun day of insight driven learning for technology professionals.
European Collaboration Summit, European AI and Cloud Summit & European BizApps Summit 2025
(📅 May 26-28, 2025)
With 3000 attendees, the European Collaboration Summit, European AI and Cloud Summit & European BizApps Summit 2025 are uniting forces to become a big, shared conference in Düsseldorf, Germany. New this year is the European BizApps Summit with a focus on Power Platform, Fabric and Dataverse.
DynamicsMinds 2025
(📅 May 26-28, 2025)
An awesome Dynamics 365 and Power Platform Community Conference. Where brilliant minds meet, mingle & share.
European Power Platform Conference 2025
(📅 June 16-19, 2025)
The European Power Platform Conference 2025 promises to be another great conference! The speakers will be announced soon, but make sure to check out the site already for the early bird sale!
💙 Out of the Blue
What’s new in Copilot Studio: March 2025
🤵🏻🦸🏻♀️🧭👩💻🚀 In this blog by Omar Aftab, a bunch of new capabilities are summed up, like for instance: autonomous agents, deep reasoning capabilities, agent flows, generative orchestration, Model Context Protocol integration, and a private preview of GPT-4.5, enhancing AI-driven automation and complex problem-solving.
Introducing agent flows: Transforming automation with AI-first workflows
🤵🏻🦸🏻♀️🧭👩💻🚀 Sangya Singh announces the general availability of agent flows - a way to create workflows inside of Copilot Studio with lots of AI capabilities.
Paste images and add files to quickly fill forms with AI
🤵🏻🦸🏻♀️🧭👩💻🚀 In this blog by Miti Joshi, you can read all about recent updates for smart paste, you can now also paste images and files to fill forms quickly with AI. Learn which files are supported when you read the blog!
Announcing the Process map public preview in Power Automate
🦸🏻♀️👩💻🚀In this blog by Apostolis Papaioannou, the public preview of Process Map in Power Automate is announced, offering enhanced process-centric monitoring, and troubleshooting by providing detailed, end-to-end visibility into processes managed by parent flows, including associated child and desktop flows.
Power BI March 2025 Feature Summary
🤵🏻🦸🏻♀️🧭👩💻🚀 In this blog by Patrick LeBlanc, the latest features of Power BI are summed that came out during the month of March! This is a great way to catch up on all the latest improvements.
Uplift your storytelling by using annotations on your Power BI visualization in PowerPoint (Preview)
🤵🏻🦸🏻♀️🧭👩💻🚀 Maya Shenhav wrote a blog about annotations on the Power BI visualization in PowerPoint. Read this blog to learn how you can use those annotations in PowerPoint.
Deep dive into using notebooks with your semantic model (Preview)
🦸🏻♀️👩💻🚀 Emily Lisa announces an update that enables seamless integration of Fabric notebooks with Power BI semantic models, offering tools like Best Practices Analyzer and Memory Analyzer, and supports collaborative development through a community notebooks gallery.
Updates to org apps (Preview) – more customization, deployment pipelines, and Git
🦸🏻♀️👩💻🚀 Dustin Askins outlines recent enhancements to Power BI's org apps (preview), including combined navigation, Git integration, and deployment pipelines, and previews upcoming features like Pro workspace support, paginated reports, mobile app viewing, and audience-specific content display.
💡 Suggest content
Do you have a blog, YouTube channel or podcast that you want us to track, or do you know someone creating great content or community tools you think we should be aware of? Let us know about it!
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👩💻 Developer / Architect
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🛠️ Tools
📅 Events & Webinars