Power Platform Developer Blog
Insights, how-tos and updates for building low code solutions with the Power Platform
Latest posts
Agent Academy Spring Drop: Special Ops, Cowork Collective, and a Whole New Look
We've shipped a big round of updates to Agent Academy. Two new sections, a completely redone site experience, and more missions on the way. Here's what's changed. Quick recap for anyone new Agent Academy is a free, open-source curriculum for learning how to build agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio. Since launching in August 2025, it has crossed one million views, which tells us the community is hungry for guided, hands-on content around building and using agents. Agent Academy features three ranks of full courses covering building agents with Copilot Studio: Recruit covers the fundamentals of Copilot Studio,...
Dataverse Skills: Your Coding Agent Now Speaks Dataverse
Building enterprise solutions is shifting from writing code to directing AI agents. Instead of stitching together APIs, CLIs, and scripts, developers are increasingly describing intent and letting agents execute. For enterprise platforms like Dataverse, this creates a new requirement: they must be operable by agents, not just by humans. Today we’re releasing Dataverse Skills — an open-source plugin for coding agents like GitHub Copilot and Claude Code that gives them deep, practical knowledge of how to build and manage Dataverse solutions end to end. What used to require juggling tools and documentation can now ...
Announcing Agent Academy: Operative
Earlier this year, we launched Agent Academy: Recruit, a foundational learning path designed to help makers and developers get started with building agents in Copilot Studio. The response exceeded our expectations. Since launch, thousands of learners have worked through the Recruit curriculum, and through the Global AI Community we’ve issued 500+ badges to people who finished the path. More importantly, we’ve seen teams use Recruit as a shared baseline for learning how agents work, how to build them responsibly, and how to deploy them into real environments. As people completed Recruit, the feedback was consist...
Announcing Copilot Studio Agent Academy: Your Mission Starts Now
Welcome to Copilot Studio Agent Academy Whether you're just starting your journey with AI agents or looking to sharpen your skills in Microsoft Copilot Studio, we've got your mission briefing ready and it's time to suit up! We're thrilled to introduce Copilot Studio Agent Academy, a new, self-paced curriculum designed to help makers, developers, and AI-curious professionals learn how to build real, useful agents using Microsoft Copilot Studio. No more theoretical fluff. No more "someday I'll figure this out." This is your chance to actually build something that works. Why We Built It Copilot Studio makes it p...
Introducing Plan Validation in Copilot Studio Kit
Ever wonder why your agent's answers can be right but for the wrong reasons? Let's dive into why that matters, with a brief foray into epistemology (bear with me!) Knowledge: More Than Just Right Answers Imagine asking someone the time, and they confidently reply, “2:30 PM.” They're correct—but what if their watch stopped exactly 12 hours ago, and they just happened to get lucky? This illustrates a classic philosophical point: the difference between a true belief and a justified true belief. And no, this isn’t just a theoretical curiosity (yes, philosophy folks are sensitive about that critique). In practice, ...
Power Platform API and SDKs: From UX-First to API-First
Historically, Power Platform has empowered administrators through the Power Platform Admin Center (PPAC). This UX-first experience offered a seamless, intuitive interface for managing environments, automating everyday tasks, and discovering new capabilities within the platform. Today, we’re taking a bold step forward. We’re transforming Power Platform into an API-first ecosystem—where every feature in PPAC is backed by a well-documented, publicly accessible API. This evolution unlocks intelligent copilots, scalable automation, and enterprise-grade management experiences that are more accessible than ever before....
Microsoft Copilot Studio ❤️ MCP
Ever wished your AI agents could tap into live data or execute actions beyond their built-in capabilities? Enter Model Context Protocol (MCP)—a game-changer for integrating external tools and data sources directly into your Copilot Studio agents. 🧠 What is MCP? Think of MCP as a universal adapter for AI applications. It standardizes how AI models access external tools, APIs, and knowledge bases. By leveraging MCP, you can: 🔄 MCP vs. Connectors: Better Together You might be wondering: When should I use MCP, and when should I use traditional connectors? Will MCP replace connectors? MCP servers are made a...
Announcing the ‘Work with Power Fx functions’ Learning Path
Based on community feedback, we’ve added a new learning path: Work with Power Fx functions. Check it out!
Announcing the winners of the 2025 Powerful Devs Hack Together
The 2025 Powerful Devs Hack Together brought developers together to build secure and scalable AI-powered solutions using Power Platform, Azure, AI Builder, and more. If you missed the event, you can still catch up on all the sessions covering AI, automation, security, extensibility, and more! 🎥 Watch here: aka.ms/powerfuldevs/ondemand Technologies Used in the Hackathon We loved seeing developers use so many different technologies to build their hack. Developers built projects using: ✔ Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, Copilot Studio) ✔ Azure Services & AI Foundry ✔ Microsoft 365 ...
Publishing, Managing and Securing: Building with Microsoft Copilot Studio
If you would like to start building an agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio, don't worry we’ve got you covered! In our AI in Action: Building with Copilot Studio series on the Microsoft Power Platform YouTube channel, we have several episodes that guide you through how to get started in building an agent. This blog post will cover Copilot Studio Security, all those things that you need to know when publishing, managing and securing your agents when building with Microsoft Copilot Studio. In the Building with Microsoft Copilot Studio series, we showcase the different capabilities of building agents with Copilot Stud...
Integrate Copilot Studio agents with Microsoft Entra External ID to give your customers access
Learn how to integrate Copilot Studio agents with Microsoft Entra External ID using the Generic OAUTH 2.0 service provider option, ensuring your customers can securely log in to your agents.
Powerful Devs Hack Together 2025 Wrap Up
We're almost at the finish line! Our Powerful Devs Hack Together is coming to a close and we encourage you to continue with your AI journey.
Bells and whistles: Building with Microsoft Copilot Studio
In this series, we showcase the different capabilities of building agents with Copilot Studio, which includes building, testing, deploying, analyzing, security and data loss prevention policy.
Mastering automated testing in Power Platform: Evergreen concepts for robust solutions
Get a deep dive into the concepts of automated testing within the Power Platform, along with insights and best practices to help you build robust and reliable solutions.
Announcing the ‘Simplify Microsoft Power Platform Deployments by Using Pipelines’ Learning Path
Microsoft Learn offers many Power Platform learn modules. Now, we are expanding the collection with a new release! Pipelines in Power Platform is a managed environments feature that has been released a while back now! Over time, it has improved significantly with updates like SPN support, deployment pages, extensibility, and personal pipelines. Many people requested more content on pipelines in Power Platform, so we created a new learning path: "Simplify Microsoft Power Platform Deployments by Using Pipelines." This path will help you: Modules in the learning path To support your learning, we are launc...
Announcing Powerful Devs Conference + Hack Together 2025
We are excited to invite you to participate in this year’s Powerful Devs Conference + Hackathon, commencing on February 12, 2025. The conference will be followed by a two-week Hack Together, ending on February 28, 2025. Join us to unleash your creativity and build innovation solutions!
Exploring the Essentials: Building Basics with Microsoft Copilot Studio
Exploring the Essentials: Building Basics with Microsoft Copilot Studio Don’t know how to start with building an agent in Microsoft Copilot Studio? We’ve got you covered! In our AI in Action: Building with Copilot Studio series on the Microsoft Power Platform YouTube channel, we have several episodes that guide you through how to get started in building an agent. In this series we showcase the different capabilities of building agents with Copilot Studio, which includes building, testing, deploying, analyzing, security and data loss prevention policy. This blog post will cover the building basics with Microso...
Automate Power Platform Environment Creation & Solution Imports with GitHub Actions (Federated Auth Setup)
Automate Power Platform Environment Creation & Solution Imports with GitHub Actions (Federated Auth Setup) Automating your CI/CD pipeline for Power Platform solutions streamlines development and reduces manual tasks. Integrating GitHub Actions with federated authentication provides secure and scalable access for creating environments, importing solutions, and even cleaning up temporary environments. This post guides you through automating these tasks with a federated authentication setup. Introduction This guide details how to automate Power Platform environment creation and solution import using GitHub ...
We are deprecating earlier versions of Visual Studio for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations development
Abstract Microsoft will no longer be shipping or supporting the Visual Studio extensions supporting development work against Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, and for the Power Platform tools, for Visual Studio versions other than Visual Studio 2022. What will change? We have supported older versions of Visual Studio for our extension that includes the project system, the X++ compiler, and so on for a long time, but we have made the decision to not support those earlier versions in the future. We will no longer ship the VSIX files for those versions, and you will not find those versions installe...
Create scripts with Power Platform CLI
The Power Platform CLI is a great tool to use when you are working with the Power Platform. You can create Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) components with it, you can do tons of administrative actions, and much more! You can run these one by one in the console when you're developing a Power Platform solution, but sometimes, you want to use multiple commands together. In this blog, I will show you how you can create scripts with Power Platform CLI. Imagine the following: I am an administrator who wants to create environments for developers. I will enable the use of PCF Controls in Canvas Apps, which is an en...
Announcing a new Learn module: Create a copilot to help promote your podcast
Microsoft Learn has always been a way to learn new skills and concepts and discover the power of Microsoft products with step-by-step guidance. Recently, there has been an increase of learn paths and modules that throw you further into the deep end allowing you to develop new skills by building an end-to-end solution or project. This is where our new module Create a copilot to help promote your podcast comes in! Through 10 units, you'll be taken on a journey exploring the integration of the Power Platform with advanced AI models to create a dynamic application inspired by Kevin Scott’s Microsoft Build 2023 demo....
Announcing a new Learn module: Use service principal authentication in custom connectors
Connectors are one of the superpowers of the Microsoft Power Platform. They link the Power Platform to a vast array of external services and applications. Over 1200 connectors are available now out of the box. But - what if the API you want to connect to doesn't have an out of the box connector? Or the existing connector doesn't do what you need? Or your company has custom APIs that they want to use with the Power Platform? APIs change all the time and that means connectors might not have the newest features. With custom connectors, you can create your own connector that connects to an API. You have control over...
The Unified Development Environment is GA!
Overview We are proud to announce that the Unified Developer Experience for Finance and Operations apps (colloquially known as UDE) is now generally available for all customers. As you may know, UDE is both the next step in the app development experience for Finance and Operations, and a powerful enabler for leveraging the value provided by Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. Many of the features provided by both Microsoft Dataverse and Finance and Operations are now seamlessly managed in a single sign-on experience that will replace the current LCS experience. Even if you are doing development of fi...
Announcing the Podcast Copilot with Azure OpenAI Service, .NET, and Power Platform Workshop
Unlocking Value with the Power Platform For years now, the Power Platform has been a low code tool that unlocks value across your business by accelerating application & automation development to meet business demand faster. Whether you’re a professional developer, an IT admin, business analyst, or a non-technical employee, low code empowers you to create solutions in a fast, secure, and compliant fashion. Now with the rise of AI, organizations are moving quickly to embrace AI in order to usher in a new wave of growth and value creation. Introducing the Podcast Copilot with Azure OpenAI Service, .NET, and Po...
Create multilingual copilots with the Power Platform CLI and Microsoft Copilot Studio
A while ago, it became possible to create multilingual copilots in Microsoft Copilot Studio. It's easy to enable the setting and have multiple languages in your copilot, but do you know how to translate your copilot into a different language? In this blog, I will show you how it can be done! This blog is part of a multi-part series on the Power Platform CLI. The following blogs appeared in this series: 🤖 Create a copilot First things first: let's create a copilot by using the creation dialog. In this case, I'm using the conversational boosting capabilities, but this is not necessa...
Unlock Retail Productivity with Power Platform and Dataverse
This year at the National Retail Federation’s (NRF) Big Show we will highlight how Power Platform can help unlock productivity and improve customer experiences in your retail shopping experiences. Store associates can face many challenges, including dealing with backorders and stockouts on items. Often, this is caused by data being scattered across multiple enterprise systems and data sources. It is nearly impossible to identify and mitigate risks with these challenges. Using Microsoft Dataverse and Power Platform to unify data, you can equip store associates with solutions that enable them to be knowledgeable in...
Power Platform Command Line Interface: October Updates
We’re excited to announce the new updates released in Power Platform CLI October updates. There are a number of improvements that we have made for you, our developer community, and we want to share with you to help overcome roadblocks and make process enhancements. The team is thankful for your continued support. Canvas app download In our previous release of Power Platform CLI, we had shared updates related to the and for your .msapp file. We are continuing to improve this process but now having an additional property to extract your .msapp file (Canvas application) to a specific folder. A developer can us...
Power Platform CLI – Simplifying authentication profiles
Good day developers! Power Platform CLI is a one stop command line interface to interact with Power Platform - aka PAC CLI. We have 3 different kinds of authentication profiles. In the version 1.16 of PAC CLI, we started to deprecate the parameter and since then, UNIVERSAL is the default profile kind. In this post, I will explain why we have different authentication profile kind, what is the intention of each type and what kind of profile you should use. 💡 What is an authentication profile? Before you can create environments on Power Platform admin center, or create apps on Power Apps, you need to authentic...
Build your next application on Dataverse – now with hyperscale support for any enterprise data
Dataverse, Microsoft’s modern and scalable business application platform in the cloud, enables developers to build enterprise-grade applications at hyperscale. Today, Dataverse encompasses over 3.5 million Azure SQL databases and leverages Azure SQL Hyperscale to support up to 100 TB per individual database--with rapid scale up, rapid scale out, and high availability. At Ignite, we announced Dataverse Link to Fabric, which enables low-code developers to activate enterprise data at any scale. We are happy to announce general availability for bulk operation APIs, improving data integration throughput and supporting...
The Visual Studio 2022 add-in is now available for Dynamics 365 for Financials and Operations.
TL;DR: The Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Visual Studio add-in is now available for use in Visual Studio 2022 (VS 2022). Visual Studio 2022 is the first 64-bit version of Visual Studio. We wanted to take advantage of the stability it brought (and set us up for the future) and this gave us the opportunity to rework and rethink some of our code. Benefits One of the big benefits of adopting this new 64-bit architecture is that it solves many of the issues that we have seen in debugging scenarios. Some of our packages are very big, and the memory pressure caused by loading the symbol files were causing ...
VHDs and CHEs with One box deployments available now (VHD FinandOps10.0.37)
TL;DR We have published updated virtual machines (VHD) and cloud hosted environments (CHE) containing the latest bits, scheduled to be released in the first week of November 2023. The new VHD Developer One-box image is based on Windows Server 2022 Datacenter. The image contains both the Visual Studio (VS) 2019 and VS 2022 versions (in the professional SKU). The VHD ships with the Platform Update 61/App 10.0.37 payload installed. The cloud hosted environments (CHE) is available for Platform Update 62 / App 10.0.38. Here you will find the VS 2022 Professional SKU, not the Enterprise version. If you need the Enter...
Power Platform Command Line Interface: September Update
We are so happy to share new updates released in Power Platform CLI September update. There are a number of improvements that we want to share with our community to help them unblock, such as stage-and-upgrade solution import, create a developer environment on behalf-of, data import with multiple connections, and such. Also, I am excited to share that we have integrated Power Fx (low-code language for PowerApps) into our Power Platform CLI. This is just the beginning of this integration. Please keep sharing your feedback for further improvements. Power Fx Integration into Power Platform CLI (preview) In this ...
Announcing the HackTogether: Power Platform Global AI Hack Winners
We’re excited to announce the winners of HackTogether: The Power Platform Global AI Hack What is #HackTogether? In this HackTogether we got the opportunity to see the power of AI Copilots in the Power Platform. We learned from advocates and other experts about Copilots, AI Builder, using Azure OpenAI service, and we even got a tutorial on using GitHub so you can share your AI powered Power Platform solutions with the community. We also heard from VP of Power Apps, Ryan Cunningham, and VP of Power Automate, Stephan Siciliano, about their experiences and thoughts about where they see this AI integration taking us...
Power Platform Global AI Hack Wrap Up
The Power Platform Global AI #HackTogether concludes, but your AI adventure is just beginning! We did it! We rocked the Power Platform Global AI #HackTogether and had a blast! We witnessed some awesome walkthroughs and demos from our brilliant experts, who taught us how to unleash the power of AI in our Power Platform solutions. You learned, you hacked, you innovated. You are all now official Power Platform AI hackers! What happened in the last week of the Power Platform Global AI #HackTogether? The final week of the hackathon started with the caring is sharing session hosted by David Warner, a must see if you...
Announcing the Power Platform solutions with AI and Copilot Learning Path
The Power Platform Advocacy Team is pleased to announce the release of the Create Power Platform solutions with AI and Copilot learning path published on Microsoft Learn. This learning path introduces you to creating Power Platform solutions with Copilot to speed up development time and add AI functionality to make your solutions more intelligent. Taking on the challenge of creating a learning path which heavily deals with AI generated content is not an easy task. As we were building, we kept getting various responses to the same prompts as is normally the case working with Generative AI. So, as you're going thr...
Power Platform Command Line Interface: August Update
We are delighted to announce our august update for the Power Platform command line. There are quite a few things we are showing in this release based on popular feedback from you, the community. The development team, the PM team and I are thankful for your continued support. Updates to update tenant settings and list tenant settings In this release we have introduced two new commands, one to list tenant settings and the other to update tenant settings. Imagine as a developer, you wanted to list the current controls put in place by admin in the tenant. Now you can do that using the following command: It the c...