Introduction Azure Logic Apps provide a powerful alternative to Power Automate for building workflows and integrations in the cloud. While both tools share similarities, Logic Apps offer unique advantages, especially for enterprise-scale solutions. However, managing Logic Apps in source control and deploying them via Azure DevOps pipelines comes with its own set of challenges. This blog post explores the differences between Logic Apps and Power Automate, highlights the limitations of Logic Apps in source control, and provides insights into handling system-assigned identities and API versions during deployment.

Introduction The PAT(Personal Access Token) is the Azure DevOps personal access token which can be generated from your account settings and used for authentication when performing Git operations. Cons using PATs Not conducive for teamwork: If the PAT belongs to a team member who leaves the organization, the release manager or another team member will have to generate their own PAT and update the pipeline. Security risks: Similar to a password, a PAT poses risks if leaked.

Introduction When setting up your Azure DevOps pipeline for deploying a Power Platform solution, you may encounter an error message if your solution relies on connection references. The reason given was : An unexpected error occurred. This generic message does not provide much help and can occur for multiple reasons. In my scenario, it was related to the connection references in the target environment not being shared with the service principal.

Client secrets have traditionally been the go-to method for deploying Power Platform solutions from Azure DevOps, utilizing app registrations from the Azure platform. However, my personal experience has shown that this approach can be problematic, especially when you are not an application admin. It often involves wasting time figuring out why deployments have failed due to expired or missing client secrets. Even when reaching out to someone with application admin rights, they might generate a new client secret but forget to update the service connections for each service connection within Azure DevOps or the application admin does not have access requiring to reach out to someone else who have access, causing further disruptions.

Introduction Thanks to Kinga Kazala for her timely article Deploy SPFx app using pipeline’s Workload Identity federation, which showcases how to use Workload Identity Federation to alleviate the need for using Entra app secrets or certificates. This method simplifies the setup process, especially when there’s reliance on a single person who might be unavailable. We initially set up the SPFx pipeline for the Test environment using certificates with CLI for M365.

If it takes too long to deploy the solution, time out issues might occur. In this instance consider checking and updating the MaxAsyncWaitTime. Its value has been increased to 120 which means the deployment process will wait up to 120 seconds (or 2 minutes) for asynchronous operations such as import power platform solution to complete fixing the timing out issue. The fix is to amend the MaxAsyncWaitTime to 120 - task: PowerPlatformImportSolution@2 inputs: authenticationType: PowerPlatformSPN PowerPlatformSPN: 'powerplatform-t-connection' Environment: 'https://contoso-st.

Overcoming Challenges with Azure DevOps Pipelines using Self-Hosted Build Agents for Power Platform Managed Solutions Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) for Power Platform solutions can be effectively managed using Azure DevOps, providing a robust framework for automating deployments, version control, and continuous integration and delivery, thereby enhancing productivity and reducing manual errors. Refer to the posts for more details: Power Platform ALM & Pipelines w/ Matt Devaney and Converting to Modern YAML Pipeline: Application Lifecycle Management in Azure DevOps for Power Platform

Converting to Modern YAML Pipeline: Application Lifecycle Management in Azure DevOps for Power Platform There are loads of posts explaining Application Lifecycle Management for the Power Platform using Azure DevOps most using the graphical classical pipeline. The latest post I read on this is Application Lifecycle Management for the Power Platform using Azure DevOps by Luise Freese which is brilliant. Please read article covering difference between YAML and Classic UI to explain why you may want the modern YAML pipeline.

Unable to find Power Platform in Azure DevOps Issue I was Unable to find the powerplatform in Azure devops Solution The solution is to install the Extension: Power Platform Build Tools (2.0.5) to Organisation. This will enable the Power Platform service connection. References Unable to find the powerplatform in Azure devops

Coauthoring with power apps issues Coauthoring in power apps allows multiple power apps developers to work on the same canvas app. Despite being an experimental feature we decided to give a try to speed up the development process. We used the blog post [How To Setup Power Apps Co-Authoring - Azure DevOps Version] (https://www.matthewdevaney.com/how-to-setup-power-apps-co-authoring-azure-dev-ops-version/). The tutorial covers step-by-step instructions for enabling co-authoring for canvas apps in Power Apps using Azure DevOps repository.