I learnt that two modest Scottish bearded gentlemen (Mark Christie and Matt Beard) with help from volunteers and sponsors can put on a free community conference which is better than paid for and that it is difficult to choose from fourteen simultaneous tracks! I learnt that Power Portal is now called Power Pages and that there are fantastic community tools available that astound me with the technical skills involved to create them. I learnt that it is maybe OK to talk about mental health in the workplace and saw british sign language translation of the most technical of topics. I learnt that Azure Static Web Pages is a darned cheap way of building a global website and that Scottish Summit is full of technically excellent attendees as well as outstanding speakers. I learnt that the trip up to Glasgow from Brighton was so worth it and that we are going to do it again on 24 April 2023.

I thought Power Pages difficult to set up until all was explained by Victor Dantas. It is a still the complex data driven product that it always was but the design studio makes it easy to access the underlying HTML and if you know Bootstrap 3.3 you can easily edit the HTML and provide web templates and snippets to create some reusability within the site. You can insert “fluid” syntax within the page to bring in and control these components as well as easily adding lists and model driven forms from Dataverse tables. A top tip was to create a separate environment if you are developing for a customer as there are so many components created in Azure to power the portal (sorry Pages).

Oliver Rodrigues showed us how to control Power Pages forms with JavaScript and the combination of a model driven (or Dynamics 365) form with Bootstrap and JavaScript is a very familiar development environment for many of us. Development is a little strenuous involving jQuery and a lot of inspection using the Browser Development Tools but that is how I grew up with JavaScript in the old days. It brought back memories of coding up old CRM forms using the client side JavaScript SDK and now it seems we just use plain old JavaScript to control these forms. Disappointing that Business Rules have not made it into Power Pages and we need to revert to the old techniques again.

There is a raft of independent Publisher Connectors being built for the Dataverse and Ahmad Najjar and Troy Taylor showed us how we can build a connector to anything with some C# code and help from the community. These connectors require Premium Power Apps licenses and are certified to allow the Dataverse to connect to almost anything. There are 100 independent connectors out there from Spotify to Schipol Airport and Troy and Ahmed tell us the community is very helpful and proud of contributing in this area.

Joe Griffin and Mark Carrington showed us how the XRMToolbox compares with the Azure toolset for managing aspects of Dynamics 365 and the DataVerse. Mark has built a SQL interface to Dynamics 65 that utilises FetchXML under the cover to allow you to issue standard SQL against your Dynamics 365 tables. There is even an ADO.NET Connector. I have been in awe of this sort of development expertise right back when I discovered that FoxPro had a team of just 6 developers and it is awesome to see such SQL genius in action for a community tool. When I think of the time I have spent trying to parse ODATA queries programmatically I must bow down and worship (I know I should have used Entity Framework).

Marcel Meurer installs and manages Virtual Desktops in Azure as his day job and has created the WVDAdmin tool to manage complex Virtual Desktop roll outs. His alternative approach allows you to maintain a “golden” desktop and easily duplicate and prep and roll out scalable desktops to users without having to learn the CLI yourself. Not only is this an invaluable time saver but Marcel has carved years of experience and his best practise into the toolset.

Static Web Applications and Blazor wrapped up in a PWA are something of interest to me in my day to day programming.  Stephanie Stimac made us aware of some of the latest tips and tricks for PWAs including link and protocol launch handling to better integrate your application with the underlying operating system be it Desktop or Mobile. I was especially interested with the Windows Control Overlay that lets you control the menu system when running a PWA under windows. See https://whatwebcando.today/ for general PWA info and https://web.dev/window-controls-overlay/ for specifically the Windows overlay.

Poornima Nayar introduced us to SWA and the ease of deployment because of automation with Github for instant seamless deployment. She also showed us the power of GraphQL and how the nuget libraries Hot Chocolate, StrawberryShake and BananaCake can help us develop functions rapidly using this data platform.

Maxim Salnikov also showed us an Evangelists view of SWA building his PWA for DJs to analyse beats per minute with a PWA application hosted on SWA. He showed us how to build and test an SWA locally by installing the Azure SWA CLI which creates a proxy server (driven by node) to route Http request between the SWA functionality and the auth and Azure function endpoints. Many things are controlled by the staticwebappconfig.json file which controls routing, page rewrites, redirects, error pages, fallbacks (to help with JavaScript frameworks) and roles.

Stacy Cashmore did a masterclass in how to give a live demo when she built her Static Web Application from scratch in 45 minutes. An SWA utilises Azure functions with client-side JavaScript (perhaps a framework) to access data from the functions. Authorisation with Github, Twitter or Microsoft authentication allows you to authenticate users and assign roles. SWA web sites can have a free SSL domain and are syndicated around web servers worldwide to provide a hugely robust set of pages for around £6 a month. The main hassle here is that you need to learn a JavaScript framework or use Blazor to present your data on the page. I am not quite sure though how Google will read and index these pages.

I do a lot of development for our Power BI Connectors to allow multi-company financial reporting from Xero, Sage 50X and 200, and QuickBooks Online so was very happy to attend Triparna Ray’s session describing her experience on very large-scale financial reporting and how to create a “single point of truth”.

There were so many tracks and interesting sessions happening all at the same time that I was only able to sample some of the knowledge offer. Zaid Zaim for example showed us how he uses the Hololens to create a virtual word representation of Palmyra blown up and partially destroyed by ISIS in 2020.

I assume everything was financed by the sponsors including Microsoft so we need to thank them for that. CODEC is a reseller for our Sage 50 Connector for Dynamics 365 so I tagged along with Brian Illand for some corporate entertainment and had some beers on Codec too.

So I did learn a lot and am going full steam ahead with developing Azure functions and SWA for delivering scalable functionality for our software products and taking a serious interest in expanding our PWA applications. Finally, I can get around to developing the Dataverse and JavaScript Power Pages to supplement our Dynamics 365 knowledge. I have come away very impressed with the community and am inspired to dive in now to these technologies having learnt from the community experts at Scottish Summit 2022.

See you at the Southern Summit in October…