>> Thanks, Donna. Hi everyone.
Welcome to the Powerful Devs conference.
This conference is all about showing code-first developers,
how they can erase the Power Platform.
My name is April Dunnam, and I'm
a Power Platform Advocate here at Microsoft.
I'm so excited to be joined today by Scott Guthrie.
He's going to be kicking things off here,
and we're going to be doing a conversation around the sea to
the industry and how developers can embrace the Power Platform.
Welcome, Scott. Thanks again for joining us,
for the second year of the Powerful Devs conference.
>> Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
>> Awesome. Well, I am really looking
forward to this conversation and
really diving into that and getting
your thoughts and opinions on,
what the Power Platform has to offer for code-first devs.
So you're ready to get started?
>> Faraway.
>> First question, coming from me as myself,
why I focus on the Power Platform here,
I do come from a.NET development background.
That's where I really started off.
Probably everyone that's watching today,
that is, code-first developers wondering,
why are we talking about Power Platform,
and what's in it for the code-first developer?
>> Yeah. A lot of us,
myself included have come from,
I'd say a code-first background.
To your question I'm like, why should you
care about the Power Platform,
if you write object-oriented or procedural code.
I think the biggest reason I'd say is,
is to have even more impact,
in terms of the applications you build,
the solutions you build,
and to the companies that you work for or deliver solutions to.
I think of it in terms of impact and
the ability of the Power Platform to quickly assemble solutions,
that can call out APIs written in.NET or written in
Java or any other code-first language,
and effectively integrate them as part of a business process.
Again, sometimes it's better to write a code API
to implement functionality in a business process, but often,
in the final solution you want to be able to assemble and
connect that API inside a Team's environment,
or some type of online collaboration tool,
with a CRM system or an SAP
or a Dynamics ERP solution on the backend.
The beauty of the Power Platform it makes it
incredibly powerful to do that,
and at the same time still integrate and
write the.NET and Java code that you know and love today,
and integrating all into one solution
that makes your customers happy.
>> Yeah. I think that's a great point.
Really it's just another tool in your tool belt
as a code-first developer that you can have,
and really a productivity and time-saver.
I know that's how I got started with the Power Platform.
Saw this thing called Power Automate, figured, hey,
I can maybe automate some of my dev task in my simple day to day.
Then I ventured into Power Apps and
realized that this can save me
a lot of time in front-end development too.
You can still use the tools that we love and the backend APIs,
but we can just use it to facilitate
and make our life a little bit easier.
That leads me though into the next question.
We talked about a little bit of the benefits and why we
should care as code-first developers about the Power Platform.
But what would you say to those that still might be
a little bit hesitant or
reluctant to really adopt and use the Power Platform?
>> Well, I think one of the big things is recognizing,
do you build an application this way or that way?
Meaning like do you use power platform or not?
I think the real way I think about is,
it's another tool in your tool chest.
In the same way that another framework libraries in
your tool chest or
another DevOps tool might be in your tool chest.
It helps solve various specific problems.
It's not the be-all,
end-all, it solves every problem in the world.
No tool does that.
But it can dramatically, I think,
help increase the impact that you have.
I think if you're hesitant,
what I'd say is, learn more.
I think there's a lot there,
and once you realize it's not all or nothing,
and that you can use it to solve various specific needs,
or something that is painful with code to write,
or something with time-consuming with code to write.
I think you'll learn to appreciate it
and be able to get even more done from it.
At the other I think it's developers,
all of us,
want to measure our impact by,
did we change the world?
Did we change our company?
Did we change our end users' success
from the applications that we build?
I think the Power Platform is
a fantastic way to accelerate all those,
and really deliver that impact.
>> Yeah, definitely. Another excellent point there,
it's not often an or,
it's an and conversation.
This is another thing that we can bring to just make our processes
and the applications that we build
even easier to build. Great point there.
This leads me on to another topic that I did want to touch on.
That's the topic of the emergence of
this concept of fusion development teams.
This is something that's not really new.
Fusion development it's been around a while,
but with the emergence of
low-code technology like the Power Platform
is something that we're seeing,
really an increase adoption of.
These teams are code-first developers and
IT pros and business users
and low-code developers working together,
to solve business problems.
Our next question, and that would be,
how does the Power Platform Azure and
Visual Studio family of tools really
facilitate that cross simply collaboration that we have,
in fusion teams to solve business problems?
>> Yeah, and again, I think this is where
it's very much an and not an or.
Is it you use Visual Studio or Power Platform or Azure,
or Azure DevOps or GitHub?
It's and. You use more.
Use which particular tool for a particular problem,
where that tool works best is the real key.
Part of what we try to do is integrate them all together.
We've now made it so that you can go into Visual Studio,
you can say file new project and
create an API project using.NET Core.
Write a standard web API, run it locally,
debug it, have a nice API calling experience.
Then the beauty is you can now publish it into Azure,
expose it with an API gateway,
you can do metering,
you can do authentication,
you can do all the things that you want to
do in terms of controlling
access and monitoring access to that API inside your enterprise.
Then you go in the Power Platform and with these two clicks,
you can browse all the APIs,
subscribe to it,
and now build frontend experiences that are
mobile apps or web apps that you can run
standalone or say hosted inside Microsoft Teams,
that again can run on your phone,
they can run on your desktop.
All of that integrated security and
just all lighting up that functionality.
You could build a simple app in
10 or 15 minutes that does all that end to end.
Or maybe instead of a UI app,
you want to have automation.
To your point on the workflow,
if I want to build a Power Automate experience,
I could say, oh, every time an email arrives,
call this API and then update my CRM system.
Again, you can do all that in the Power Platform in minutes,
and take advantage of hundreds of
built-in connectors that come out of the box,
that can integrate with Dynamics or Office or Teams or
ServiceNow or SAP or
Oracle or any other number of solutions out there.
The beauty of being able to take that declarative,
very fast Power Platform experience,
and at the same time still call your.NET APIs,
and be able to bridge into very procedural code,
it's an and, and it's
incredibly powerful when you put all that together.
>> Yeah, definitely.
We've had so many improvements and new things with
the Titan integration with
code-first for dev tools and the Power Platform.
I will say to everyone watching you,
maybe you've used the Power Platform
and tried it out like four or five years ago.
It's not the same set of tools,
that we've added so much more functionality in there,
with the integration story from
the Power Platform CLI and the VS code extension,
so that we can natively in the tools that we're
already using as developers,
integrates and unpack our Canvas source code
and deploy our assets and our solutions and all of that.
The integration has really come a
long way and it's really tightened and become
more seamless for developers
to be able to take the tools are already using,
and start plug and playing with the Power Platform so many things.
Definitely keep that in mind for all of you watching.
If you haven't looked at it lately, look at it again,
because we have a lot of new great features that we've
added from the code-first developer side of things.
Scott, it's just has been great. I do have
one more question for you.
Speaking of these Fusion Teams and
Code-First integration with the Power Platform,
I know there's no shortage of amazing stories out
there of this Code-First and Power Platform integration.
But what is your favorite story?
I'd be curious to hear that you've heard of
this developer innovation in the Power Platform.
>> Yeah. I mean, there's a couple. I find for
the Power Platform is like there's a new story
every week that the team sends me.
Often it's a great technology story,
but it's a real growing business impact story.
The last 18 months in particular during COVID,
I think every organization has had to really
adapt quickly and often change business processes,
figure out how to work from home,
create new security models,
create new ways of doing business all in the fly.
I liked so many of the stories I've heard.
Speak to the ability of developers in
IT to not just get things done for their company,
but really be essential to their company.
The companies in some cases wouldn't
stay in business without them.
I think that ability to have impact and
a deep business level means that you as
a developer are so much more
valuable to the organization you work for.
A couple of examples off top my head: Toyota Motor North America
is a giant organization and delivers and
manufacturers millions of vehicles across North America.
They have a whole wide variety
of different solutions that they need.
They need not just the build functionality,
but they need really thorough governance processes.
They need more your support, tens of thousands of developers,
and then built a center of excellence within
the organization and now built more than 400 different Power Apps.
Not just the Power Apps but the Power Platform,
but they're using our Azure AI Services,
both Cognitive Services,
Machine Learning, Computer Vision,
our Azure Application Platform and Data Platforms,
and re-stitching all these things together.
If you're installing components and having to manage
travel and safety because of COVID,
they were able to create an app for that.
If you're doing processes in support of employees,
that need health care and other things
that are top of mind right now,
they've build apps for that.
If they need help manage supply chain crises,
which everyone in manufacturing
the world today is having to struggle with,
they've built apps for that.
Again, that ability to pull all those things
together and literally deliver
hundreds of apps over the last year,
to touch every one of their employees lives
and really pull a full power of the Microsoft Platform,
I think, again, speaks to what's possible.
There's literally thousands of companies or
tens of thousands of companies now that can tell that story.
I think, again,
to everyone watching here,
definitely urge you to learn because, I think,
you could tell those same stories about
your organization as you learn more about
the Power Platform and you start playing
around with it and learning what you can do it,
which is really change the world,
and so if we wish you the best of luck with it.
>> Yeah. The Toyota story is really great and I think it
shows we've actually got
so many great stories coming out of the pandemic.
We had to shift gears so fast to accommodate for
the changing workforce there and working from
home and everything that went along with it.
That really in a way gave the Power Platform
an opportunity to shine because customer and
all these big customers like Toyota were able to
turn to that and be able to meet a need with
something that with traditional code alone might have
taken quite a while to be able to adapt to get that.
But with the Power Platform,
they've saved so much time and be able to build
solutions in days rather than weeks or months,
and be able to meet the needs there from anything.
We're seeing that again today with trying to get
back to work and back in the office and return to work solutions.
We have several templates and solutions that are plug-and-play,
ready to use for the Power Platform also,
to do things like reserving desk and dust reservations and
reserving spots in the office to come back safely and all that.
We've seen a lot of great stories evolve from them.
The Toyota case study as well,
one of the things really interested me was they'd started using
Power Apps heavily for the application development side.
One of the things they were trying to do is surveying facilities.
You notice that they're able to go from
about a five percent dealers surveying to 100 percent of dealers,
which is a huge productivity gain there.
That was something that really stood out to
me with the Toyota story.
Just how quickly and how fast they were able to adapt and
increase their productivity by embracing tools like Power Apps.
>> Definitely.
>> Yeah. There's so many other great case studies
as well that we have there.
Coca-Cola Bottling is another one that comes to mind.
Again, in using and integrating with all of
the Code-First technologies that were used
to Azure Cognitive Services,
an AI, and Visual and Studio,.NET,
APIs, and Custom Connectors.
Really, the possibilities are
endless with what we can do and you're going to see
some of that today as like with the conference plays out here.
We're going to see how we can integrate code in
our custom connectors which is a ways that we can take
our APIs and services and bring
those into the Power Platform solutions that we're building.
You'll see things like using Space APIs
and creating reusable components
with Power Apps component framework.
Lots of different opportunities and things that we're
going to see today for what we can do.
This has been such a fun conversation, Scott.
Last thing I wanted to ask here for everyone watching,
do you have any cause of actions for everyone here?
>> Yeah. First of all, I hope you'll
learn more from the conference.
Then also, I know that a lot of people watching,
they're on Fusion Dev Teams today and have experience using
the Power Platform and doing
Fusion development as a team and as a developer.
It'd be great if you could send us some of your stories,
it'll be great for us to both learn about them,
draw and build the product better because of them.
Also share them in other future events and conferences.
Definitely send us your stories and we'd love to hear about them.
>> Yeah, definitely. You can just drop those in
the chat or you can reach out to me on Twitter.
Let me know, we'd love to hear those stories.
Also if you're watching as well,
I want to let you know that we do have
a Power Platform Developer Plan that you can sign up for for free.
To get started today,
trying out some of the features of
what the Power platform has to offer.
You can go to aka.ms/slashpowerappsdevplan
to get signed up for that free developer plan
today and get started with that.
Thank you so much for joining us Scott.
What a great conversation.
>> No, thanks so much for having me and thank you everyone for
watching and really appreciate you being here.
>> Thanks. All right. Back to you, Greg and Gana.