Developer Support

Advocacy and Innovation

What’s In A Name?

Productivity and efficiency (pronounced developer happiness) are hinged on reducing one's cognitive overhead; if I have to stop what I’m doing to process why something is the way it is, there's a chance that the design was flawed. Norman Doors exist everywhere; let’s get rid of them a name at a time.

Legacy Apps

Many developers have had the opportunity to inherit code and applications. When that happens the first response is often to want to rewrite, refactor or kill it if it is using older or unsupported technologies. Oftentimes, we also have to consider modern design and improvement to existing technologies that have made the application obsolete.

Testing Online Connectivity in PowerApps

This post will walk through testing the Connection.Connected property in your PowerApps. If you are building a PowerApp with offline capabilities, then it becomes very important to test whether the device has an active internet connection. The sensor function Connection.Connected can be used to test for connectivity – if true, you are connected, false not so much. A common scenario is to check the result of this function in an OnSelect formula. If connected, write or submit to a live data source, if disconnected, write to local collection for submittal later.

PowerApps Reusable Components

In this post, I’ll show you how to create reusable canvas components for your PowerApps. For this example, I’m going to create a control to display today’s date, visualized as one of those daily tear-off calendars you might have seen at some point on someone’s desk. Since the component will be reusable on multiple screens, I’ll add properties to the control to set the data and visual configurations. I’ll also show how to use relative sizing to scale the controls when the component is resized, and how to scale font sizes as well.

PowerApps Design – Create a Digital Alarm Clock Display

In this post, we’ll look at how to use SVG images and some formulas to create a digital alarm clock style display in PowerApps. This is going to involve some image manipulation, so I’ll use one of my favorite free vector programs, Inkscape, to create SVG files that can be used in the clock display. I’ll also be using a free-for-commercial use digital clock font for this example (thanks to the author).