Power Platform Dev Weekly #278

and

Oct 15, 2025

Welcome to the Power Platform Developers Weekly!

This week is South Coast Summit, and they are hosting the UK Microsoft Community Awards on Friday. Voting is still open and some of our regular contributors are up for awards! Please vote here and good luck to all the finalists!

A few of our curators are in attendance, if you see any of us then please come and say hello - it’s always lovely to hear that people read this newsletter and we’d love to chat.

Microsoft feature releases and announcements

We need to follow more content creators. If you know anyone who writes blogs or creates videos, please fill out the form on their behalf provided on this website so we can start tracking them.

👉 Buy us a coffee! 👈

We hope you enjoy the content of this week.

— PP Dev Weekly Team

Follow us: Twitter, Mastodon, BlueSky & LinkedIn

🥇 Cover Story

Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 Arrives in Microsoft Copilot Studio

Dave Burrell reports on Claude Sonnet 4.5 appearing in Microsoft Copilot Studio for the first time. One of the first time we are seeing multiple AI providers in a single platform means we are now spoilt with choice and difficult decisions!

Dave breaks some it down in this weeks cover story.

💎 Model Driven Apps & Dataverse

PACX: Lightweight, command line-based, PluginRegistrationTool
by Riccardo Gregori
Nothing fits this newsletter better than when a developer identifies a tool they need that doesn’t exist and decides to go and build it, before releasing it for free for us all to use. There are a whole bunch of use cases for a new pacx tool and this will bridge a gap!

A practical guide to relative paths on solution mapping files
by Riccardo Gregori
The second article form Riccardo, he is hitting it out of the park! This time, he discusses structures of your solutions and why mapping files matter. This is a proper deep dive and well worth a read.

😎 Power Automate

Date Only vs User Local dates in the Power Platform
by Pieter Veenstra
Dates are always an issue. Pieter highlights 2 strategies and the gotchas for dealing with them - we’ve all been stung by them and will continue to be, so reference blogs like this are always a worthwhile bookmark.

Power Automate - Generative Actions
by David Wyatt
Another excellent article from David, this time on how to link to generative actions in your Flows. There is so many use case of these generative actions - understanding this will really give a head start.

🏋️‍♂️ Canvas Apps

Power Platform Performance: Enhancing Form Performance in Power Apps
by Kailash Ramachandran
An excellent article that highlights options for improving canvas app performance. It’s so easy to see the performance get worse over time and to promote good use of an app, performance is criticial!

Geolocation in Power Apps: Translating Addresses and Validating Check-Ins
by Temmy Wahyu Raharjo
The rock star again shows his skills in canvas apps using geolocation check ins. Lots of lovely code samples and moving parts here!

🌎 Power Pages

Power Pages Fundamentals #24: Boosting Portal Security with Azure Single Sign-On
by Venkata Subbarao Polisetty
Venkata shares an overview of the SSO functionality in Power Pages and how to enable it.

🤖 Copilot

Secret Way To Create Excel File Using Copilot Studio Prompts
by Matthew Devaney
Matthew shows a “secret” (not any more) way of using Copilot to create Excel files. A usual strong blog post from Matthew and one that everyone should have bookmarked, or in their fees.

A Scenario-Based Exploration of Responsible AI Development
by Bala Madhusoodhanan
An excellent article going deep in AI development techniques, with a responsibility focus. We all love playing with the latest and greatest, but never forget to apply good practice throughout!