2021 February DC Chapter Meeting

Thanks to everyone who joined us for our 2021 February DC Chapter Meeting! If you missed it, check out all the great information that was shared.

Chapter Updates

There were several different chapters within the Washington area region dedicated to different areas of the Power Platform. We recently decided to merge these captures to deliver consistent content virtually. Join our Meetup group to stay up to date on these events!

We will be hosting monthly events on the second Wednesday of the month. This will feature an open discussion and happy hour time from 5-6pm EST. Then content and additional discussion from 6-7pm EST. We hope this bite-size format will help even more people join us!

Power Wiki

Kicking it off, Carina Claesson (LinkedIn, Twitter) and Benedikt Bergmann (LinkedIn, Twitter, blog) joined us to share the Power Wiki. This amazing resource combines all the information you could want about the Power Platform! All content is tagged to help you find items that are the most relevant to you. You can search by role, subject, feature, and more.

Check out the recording for more information and a quick demo. You can also try the Random Page feature to learn about a new topic. Oh and don’t forget the Glossary to help with all the acronyms related to the Power Platform. Then jump in and add your own content too!

Preventing Infinite Loops in Power Automate

Next up, Jamie Willis-Rose (LinkedIn, Twitter, Blog) talked through a recent lessons learned to ensure our Flows in Power Automate do not keep running and triggering itself. He demonstrated how this could be solved with a condition but this still results in multiple runs of the flow. Alternatively, we can use Trigger conditions to prevent the flow from triggering in these scenarios.

Trick: Use the Compose action to help you write your expressions in a more user friendly way! (Just remember to add the @ before this expression in the Trigger conditions area.)

Flow Best Practices

Nelson Johnson (LinkedIn, Twitter) also shared the top Flow Best Practices that he has been learning. This included tips on how to keep your flows manageable, how to identify opportunities for child flows, Trigger best practices and more!

Connecting to Dataverse from Azure Function using Azure Key Vault

Last but not least, Aiden Kaskela (LinkedIn, Twitter, Site) shows us how to build a custom connector to be used in Power Automate that will connect to Azure Key Vault to help with authentication. This includes a lot of other things that are beyond my expertise around APIs, Clients, Secrets, and other cool things.

I did learn that Azure Key Value can be used for anything that you do not want to store in your configuration file. Each secret will have a name and then an identifier of the current version. This generates a URL for each secure value.

A more detailed version of this session was also delivered at GlobalCon.

Next Steps

Thanks again for catching up with our Washington, DC Chapter virtually! Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel to catch all of meeting content and RSVP for our next meeting on March 10. Also keep in mind that my Events Page always has all upcoming community activities and past event links.