How does a PowerApp become a fully-fledged software application? Richard chats with Luise Freese about her experience of taking a PowerApp built by an individual through the "onboarding process" of becoming a complete software application, including requirements, tests, deployment pipeline, security, user training, and more. It's easy to create a prototype of an application with PowerApps, but once you move beyond the basics, there's a significant amount of work that's essential to the long-term health of the app. Luise discusses how often PowerApps utilizes "free" data sources, such as SharePoint lists, rather than the underlying datasets that require a license. This hinders performance and reliability; it's better to work with the right APIs and data sources. It's also an accomplishment, as what started as an individual's automation is now a part of the suite of applications that a company depends on!

Links

• Power Apps and Power Automate
• Luise's Blog Post
• Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit
• Entra ID for Power Apps

Recorded June 27, 2025

How has Azure been innovating lately? While at Build Richard chatted with Azure CTO Mark Russinovich about some of the latest innovations in Azure, including some of the new hardware available. Mark talks about working with hardware manufacturers to build servers optimized to the workloads the largest Azure customers need. The conversation also explores the new innovations in AI and how Azure is being optimized to serve those workloads - and be shaped by them! Mark also talks about how material science is evolving with generative AI technologies leading to a discussion about the coming role of quantum computing - and how that will live in the cloud as well!

Links

• Scott and Mark Learn to...
• Azure F-Family VMs
• Hollow Core Fiber
• Majorana 1 Quantum Processor

Recorded May 20, 2025

How do you get more from GitHub in your work routine? Richard chats with April Yoho about how sysadmins can take advantage of more GitHub features to make better quality scripts and more! April discusses the capabilities of GitHub Copilot to assist administrators in comprehending the intricacies of source management, including branching and merging. The conversation also delves into extracting more from Copilot itself, including custom instructions and the new agentic mode. Now you can use Copilot to describe a new script and turn it into a series of GitHub issues - and those issues can be assigned to an agentic AI to get the code written!

Links

• SPACE Framework
• Custom Instructions for GitHub Copilot
• Resolving Merge Conflicts
• Agent Mode in VS Code

Recorded May 20, 2025