Microsoft Dataverse on Nicolas Nowinski

Power Platform CLI: Installing, Connecting, and Selecting an Organization

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 03:29:15 +0000

I’ve been spending some time with the modern tooling and thought it would help to blog some of the step-by-step to help others.

Install PAC CLI

Open a command prompt and type pac to see if the Power Platforms CLI (command line interface) is installed on your machine. If you get an error (not found) you’ll need to install the PAC CLI.

Go to https://aka.ms/PowerAppsCLI to download the installer. Then run the installer. If the CLI installs successfully than the pac command should run successfully and display a list of commands.

Citizen Developers Have Always Existed

Wed, 16 Nov 2022 18:06:30 +0000

When IT leaders push back on “citizen development” they are just displaying their closed mindedness and incompetence. Every successful organization is - right now, today - full of citizen developers, people using whatever technology tools they have available (and often finding ways to get around IT limitations to get additional tools) to get their job done.

If you don’t enable your workforce to create solutions for themselves they will still find a way to create them. No organization has the budget to solve every use case with centralized IT. Workers don’t have a choice, they have a job to get done and they’ll get it done - with or without IT’s support or blessing.

Calculating Next Anniversary/Birthday Date in Dataverse with Power Fx (Revisited)

Sat, 23 Jul 2022 03:21:49 +0000

About 4 1/2 years ago I wrote a post on how to calculate a next anniversary (birthday) date in Dynamics 365. It’s been a top 3 post according to Google Analytics. I’m proud of that solution because it was a real no-code solution to a common requirement for lots of applications (especially CRM systems.)

A client of mine recently asked for support to show the next birthday for a contact. Often there will be an ask for a list view of contacts with a birthday in the next month. In this post I’m going to show you how to use a business rule and calculated fields to achieve this functionality without writing any code. This will be a a native calculated field so it can be used in lists, forms, queries, etc.