Blog - Recent Posts

Monitor tool - An introduction to how to use monitor, and what it can do

Monitor is important tool that all app builders should be familar with. It enables us to debug, diagnose problems with apps, and to trace performance.

General - How to undelete or restore deleted apps

Have you or someone in your company ever accidentally deleted a canvas app? In this situation, there's no need to worry! We can restore deleted apps with PowerShell and in this post, we'll walk through how.

Code - Template Apps - How to unhide/re-enable the data panel

By using the code designer, it's possible to hack the behaviour of how an app appears in Power Apps Studio. In this post, we'll examine the manifest file of a canvas app and look at how to modify the contents to unhide the data panel of an app.

Dataverse - How to access data more easily through TDS

We can more easily access records in Dataverse by enabling the TDS protocol. This opens up read-only access to tables through SQL Management Studio and PowerBI. In this post, we'll look at why we might want to do this and the steps to set this up.

Dataverse - How to calculate durations with calculated columns

We can use calculated columns to calculate the difference between two date/time values. The available functions that apply to date fields work only between columns of the same behaviour type. This can cause problems, mostly in cases where we need to calculate an elapsed duration with the help of the Now() function. This post examines this issue, and offers a quick overview on how to define a calculated column.

Email - How to send email with the Office 365 Outlook connector

Sending messages with the Outlook connector can be tricky. What's the syntax to specify multiple recipients, BCC/CC recipients, the 'From' and 'Reply-to' email addresses, the message importance and attachments? How do we define line breaks in the message body? This post will answer all of these common questions.

Dates - The easiest way to return the day name for a date

Given an input date, how can we return corresponding day name - for example, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc? In this post, I'll describe the easiest way to do this, in a way that supports multiple languages.

General - How to change the language of Power Apps Studio

How do we change the display language of Power Apps Studio? In this post, we'll take a brief look at the language settings and find out where to change the display language.

2021 Release Wave 1 - A review of the upcoming features for April - September 2021

The 2021 Release Wave 1 plan describes the Power Platform features that are scheduled for release between April 2021 and September 2021. What features have been planned for Power Apps? In this post, I'll provide a brief summary of the Power Apps features in the plan.

SharePoint - How to filter records by the current user

A common requirement is to filter SharePoint records by email address. This use case scenario often attracts many questions from app builders who struggle to implement this in a delegable way. In this post, I'll describe how to carry out this type of filtering in a delegable way.

Intro - How to build Canvas Apps with code

An exciting new experimental feature is the ability to extract and to edit the source code of canvas apps. This enables us to develop apps outside of Power Apps studio, integrate with source control systems, and to take advantage that more powerful IDEs such as Visual Studio Code offer. This post introduces this topic, and I'll describe how we can create a simple 'hello world' screen using Visual Studio Code.

General - How to display barcodes

Power Apps provides great support for scanning barcodes. How to display barcodes may not be as obvious. In this post, we'll look at a quick and easy way to display barcodes in a canvas app.

Location - Finding the closest location and and sorting records by distance, based on the current location of the user

Given a data source that contains a list of locations, which record matches the location that is nearest to an input location? This is typical challenge we face when we want to build a feature that, for example, returns a list of stores that is sorted in distance relative to the current location of a customer. In this post, we'll walk through the formula that enables us to carry out this calculation.

SQL - Caution! This is how users can hack shared SQL connections

Is your SQL Server data as secure as you think? If we create a shared 'implicit' connection, our database may be more open than we think. In this post, we'll look at how users can exploit the security vulnerability that is associated with this connection type.

SQL - How NOT to name database tables, columns, and objects

Tip - unexpected errors are less likely to occur when we adhere to simple naming conventions - eg, those without spaces and special characters. In this post, we'll examine a Power Apps bug that occurs when we reference columns that begin with a number.