Posts
Personal: One Important Little Loss
Summary: I had the terrible privilege of scheduling gentle in-home euthanasia for a cat I rescued back in my Dallas days yesterday. She was amazing in every way an animal companion can be.
Power Apps: So, About That 'Expand' Function with Dataverse Offline First Mode...
Summary: In Power Apps, the expand function is used to retrieve related data from other tables or entities within the same data source when you query data. This is particularly useful when working with data models that have relationships between entities, such as in a Common Data Service (now called Dataverse) or SharePoint lists. The magic trick that our client, my team, Microsoft, and I faced? Why were these things being randomly fired in a canvas app which caused a nightmare scenario of generic “network errors” seen by our UAT users. This post is the background on the function and a warning to those who adopt the offline first capability with Dataverse with the Power Apps stack.
Hiking: Scioto Trail State Park
Summary: Getting out of the house and putting in some physical activity has been beneficial for me over the course of my life. It was during The Pandemic, however, that I used some of the trip logs I had stashed to find some off the path spots to go out for weekends or short overnights in the Ohio Valley Region. Great Seal State Park, one of my favorites for its low traffic, small footprint campground with a large number of strenuous trails to get lost upon has a nearby sibling which I just checked out last night. This post is about Scioto Trail State Park after doing the short ~3 mile lake loop last night.
Power Apps Test Studio: Some Hard Observations
Summary: The Power Apps Test Studio is, in most cases, a lackluster tool for creating both unit tests and automated UI test cases. Yes, it mimics some of that functionality that other more mature platforms provide, and there is a case to be made for very simple micro apps possibly benefitting from this feature from a checkbox perspective, it’s wholly unuseful for large scale enterprise low code (or “pro code” as we are beginning to call it) applications. Here are my findings and some alternative paths.
Custom Forms: Where Low Code Meets Engineering Practices in Canvas Applications
Summary: Building a container-based form in Power Apps has several advantages over using the out-of-the-box card-based form control. This post breaks down some of the advantages for these while identifying scenarios where the simpler out of the box form control is a decent tool for those jobs as well.
30/60/90 Day Framework
Summary: Took the weekend off in part for the Fourth of July but always for my husband’s birthday. Throguh this downtime I put my home gym back together, spent quality time with my fella, and had some focused conversations with my goals. THis post is about the 30-60-90 day plan I put together toward rebooting my lifestyle post Pandemic in an era of pervasive industrial anxiety. We can choose to live to work, or work to live. It’s time I chose the latter.
A moment of reflection before turning, yet again, forward
Summary: I got a wake-up call during my last health checkup. Evidently working 7 days a week for two solid months in an atmosphere of constant anxiety is not healthy for a fella. So I’m taking a moment to explore how I took the wrong fork during The Pandemic and how I am course correcting.
Workout Routine
Phase one of my next 30 days, slow and easy with lots of rest and healthier food choices ahead.
How to build a custom form in a Canvas App using prinicpals from Atomic Design
Summary: I have been on a project where the client needed an extremely complex custom form with a matrix of visibility and validation rules by organizational division. Atomic design came in handy, and here’s how.
Creating a Blog Using Jekyll on an Ubuntu Machine
Summary: A no cost way to standup a static web site using Jeckyll, Markdown files, on an Ubuntu rig hosted for free as a GitHub pages site with HTTPS.