Power Platform Dev Weekly #282

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Dec 10, 2025

Welcome to the Power Platform Developers Weekly!

After a busy fortnight of European events including (but not limited to) ESPC and CollabDays Oslo, the festive season slowly dawns upon us. If you celebrate, we hope your run-up to the festivities is a pleasant one - and if you don’t, we still hope you’re having a wonderful time!

Microsoft feature releases and announcements

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We hope you enjoy the content of this week.

— PP Dev Weekly Team

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🥇 Cover Story

Custom Themes Per App, Not Just Per Environment In Dataverse

by Megan V. Walker and Bülent Altinsoy

Mixture of authors in the headline story here - Megan brings the blog post but it’s content comes by proxy of a post on LinkedIn by Bülent Altinsoy. A new modern theme designer wasn’t something on my 2025 bingo card, however it’s a lovely little feature and is one of those features that sets apart a good implementation from a fantastic implementation.

💎 Model Driven Apps & Dataverse

TDS Endpoint vs QueryExpression vs FetchExpression
by Temmy Wahyu Raharjo
Expanding on from our very own Marks blog post back in September, Temmy has gone a step further in their blog post with some great code examples to really push the different Dataverse messages and test their performance!

Mastering Alternate Keys in Dataverse: The Key to Seamless Integration, Upserts, and Sync
by Kailash Ramachandran
In the world of Dataverse and Power Platform development, GUIDs (record IDs) are often the go-to for identifying records. But in integration-heavy scenarios where external systems don’t (and shouldn’t) know about Dataverse-specific GUIDs there’s a smarter, more maintainable way to reference and sync data: Alternate Keys

🏋️‍♂️ Canvas Apps

Automated Testing Power Apps – Controls and More
by Pieter Veenstra
An extension on a blog post by Pieter that was enjoyed first time around - combining the technologies to do some clever things. Once again Pieter is using Power Automate Desktop to perform automated testing across a number of known controls in Canvas Apps.

🤖 Copilot

Exam AB-730: AI Business Professional
by The CRM Ninja
EY shares his thoughts on a new exam by Microsoft in the AB series - a very heavy Copilot focussed exam that has took my interest and one I will be certain to look into into the New Year!

😎 Power Automate

How to Build Environment-Aware Flows by Fetching CRM Metadata Dynamically in Power Automate
by Inogic
Hard-coding CRM URLs or using record metadata parsing just to extract environment details might “work,” but they introduce maintenance overhead, fragility, and complexity across environments. By leveraging a Custom API + the SDK’s RetrieveCurrentOrganizationRequest, you get a clean, reliable, reusable way to fetch environment metadata like CRM URL and Tenant ID. Read to know more.

Replace the Excel Online connector with the Microsoft Graph API in Power Automate
by Pieter Veenstra
If you have worked with the Excel Online connector in Power Automate then you will most likely know the pains of this connector. In this post Pieter gives an easy way to replace the connector with the much more reliable Microsoft Graph API alternative

👍 Everything else in Power Platform

Fixing Power Platform Pipelines
by David Wyatt
A follow-up on the built-in Power Platform Pipelines that looks at fixing their main weak spot – security and governance around deployments. It shows how to use a service account instead of a developer’s login, plus a few smart automations, to safely handle connections and ownership when moving solutions into production.