The Most Important Power Platform And Microsoft Windows Updates: Build 2021

Microsoft unveiled a new natural language model for Power Fx along with other new Power Platform and Windows capabilities during its Build developer conference.

What’s Next For Power Platform And Windows

A new natural language model for Power Fx, a new Power Platform process mining capability and an updated Windows Terminal are among the major announcements for developers this week at the virtual Microsoft Build 2021 conference.

Microsoft’s Power Platform is a suite of products for people without coding experience. At $20 a user, the premium version of the Power BI business intelligence product in particular has become more accessible for smaller organizations, said Murray Foxcroft, chief technology officer of Atlanta-based ProArch, a Microsoft Gold partner. His customers have enjoyed some of the integrations with the Dynamics 365 platform for people with non-coding backgrounds. Customers have used Microsoft’s Power products to automate some routine tasks and build some simple apps like a customer onboarding form. More complex apps with 50,000 users, however, will still need IT teams for building and designing.

“It‘s a productivity tool to be used on a departmental level,” Foxcroft said. “Departments want to take up their own little bits of the pie. They want to engage with third-party vendors to use Dynamics, or they want to build their own data analytics team because they don’t want to wait for central IT. And the same with Power Platform. We want to build some little apps, maybe a customer onboarding form or something like that.”

The Power Platform is getting significant attention this week at Microsoft’s Build developer conference. The tech giant has announced new capabilities to make the product suite more accessible for non-developers. “Traditional code-first development struggles to scale to support growing demand,” wrote Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud and AI Group, in a blog post Tuesday.

That is why many pro developers “are looking for ways to blend code-first tools with low-code tools, like Power Apps, to accelerate their workflow and delivery of business apps as well as help them focus on initiatives that have most impact with code-first approaches,” Guthrie wrote.

In the month after Ignite, when Microsoft announced Power Automate Desktop’s availability for Windows 10 for free, the company saw download increase six-fold. “Just like Office revolutionized productivity gains for knowledge workers, Power Platform will do the same for domain experts,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during the company’s quarterly earnings call in April. The company said at the time that Power Platform is used by 16 million monthly active users, up 97 percent year over year, while Power Platform revenue has increased by 84 percent year over year.

Meanwhile at Build, Microsoft also updated developers on more capabilities for the Windows operating system. What follows are the most important Power Platform and Microsoft Windows updates at Build 2021.

Natural Language Through GPT-3

Microsoft announced public previews for select users in English and in North America by the end of June for new Power Apps features as a result of integration with GPT-3, a natural language model developed by OpenAI to help users who don’t know code build apps. The goal is for non-developers to still build applications to perform tasks like review nonprofit gift donations and manage travel, Microsoft said.

GPT-3 runs on Microsoft Azure and is powered by Azure Machine Learning. The Power Platform and Azure AI teams even worked together with Azure Machine Learning to translate expressions using the natural language and Power Fx low-code coding language.

Before the new GPT-3-powered features, Power Platform users still needed to know how to write formulas, even if they didn’t need to know a coding language. Now, they can write in conversational text, according to Microsoft.

Power Fx Expansion Coming

Next month, a preview becomes available of expanded use of the Microsoft Power Fx low-code open-source programming language in Model Driven Commanding and Dataverse Calculated Columns, no longer requiring manual calculations and giving Dataverse an Excel-like interactivity.

In June, Microsoft will also release a preview of Power BI Premium capabilities for dataflows streaming and automatic aggregation of commonly used queries and reports involving large datasets. The goal is speeding up report creation and consumption, according to the company.

Another preview announced at Build is a Microsoft Power BI analytics reports integration with Jupyter Notebook, an open-source development tool with documents that have live code, quotations, visualizations and narrative text. Power BI Embedded Analytics allows developers to explore data analytics and generate reports.

Microsoft also said that coming soon are more native Power Platform Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code integrations, command-line interface (CLI) support for source code files and packaging, independent publisher connector capabilities and an application lifecycle management (ALM) accelerator. These new features aim to make fusion teams easier to participate in from within the developer’s tools of choice, according to Microsoft.

Process Mining Tool Among Other Power Improvements

At Build 2021, Microsoft announced that Process Advisor is now generally available. This process mining capability in Microsoft Power Automate identifies the most time-consuming and repeated activities across an organization and recommends automating them. Users can use this process mining tool and robotic process automation in Power Automate to automate tasks even without extensive coding ability.

Another Power Platform update that’s generally available is a new integration for Microsoft Power Virtual Agents, which allow people without coding expertise to make conversational AI-driven bots. Virtual Agents is now integrated with Bot Framework Composer, a visual authoring tool. Users can use this integration to access conversational memory and context and allow developers and people without coding expertise to work together to build bots.

Microsoft has also allowed users to share Power Apps-built applications within Teams. Soon, users can share bots built with Power Virtual Agents with security groups.

Windows Updates

For experienced developers, announcements at Build 2021 around Windows include the preview for Project Reunion 0.8. Project Reunion grants access to modern Windows technologies with the best of existing desktop (Win32) features, Microsoft said. This updated version includes down-level support to Windows 10 version 1809 and .NET 5 support.

This summer, The Microsoft Store will sell Snapdragon Developer Kits, which are Windows on ARM-based PCs for developers. The goal from Microsoft and Qualcomm is to allow more developers to port Windows apps to support ARM64 natively with hardware that is less expensive than consumer notebooks. The kits are Windows PC reference devices based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c compute platform.

The Windows search bar will soon gain the ability to find apps and files not just on the web, but in tools including Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

A preview of Windows Terminal 1.9 is now available, Microsoft said. A new feature called Quake Mode allows quick opening of a new terminal window from anywhere in Windows with a keyboard shortcut. Users also no longer need to edit a JSON file.

Now in general availability is Microsoft Edge WebView2 for Win32 C/C++, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), Windows Forms and WinUI 3. WebView2 is meant to give developers access to web-based experiences in their native apps, according to Microsoft. Developers can use the Microsoft Edge web browser and the Chromium open-source codebase to render apps. WebView2 is also decoupled from the operating system (OS) allowing use with any supported version of Windows.