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ALM GitHub Sample Workflows for Power Platform: A Comprehensive Guide for Computer Science Students

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: New blog articles in Microsoft Community Hub.

Learn about the new Power Platform workflows on GitHub that add flexibility and functionality to your tasks. Explore the Create Environment, Export, Unpack, and Commit, and Delete Environment workflows, and see how they can streamline your workflows. Perfect for Computer Science students interested in Power Platform or DevOps.

 

GitHub Source control is important for students to learn when working with Power Apps (and other software development projects) because it helps them to:

  1. Collaborate with others: With source control, multiple people can work on the same project at the same time without interfering with each other's work. This is especially important for group projects, where students need to work together to complete a project.

  2. Keep track of changes: Source control allows students to keep track of all the changes made to a project, including who made the changes and when. This makes it easier to identify and fix errors and provides a record of the project's development over time.

  3. Revert to previous versions: Source control allows students to revert to previous versions of a project if needed. This can be helpful if a change causes unexpected problems or if a student accidentally deletes something important.

  4. Maintain code quality: By using source control, students can ensure that the code they write is of high quality and meets industry standards. This is because they can review each other's code, provide feedback, and make suggestions for improvements.

  5. Prepare for real-world scenarios: Source control is a fundamental skill used in professional software development, and learning it as a student can prepare students for working in industry after graduation.

Source control is a crucial aspect of software development and learning it as a student can provide many benefits, including collaboration, version control, quality assurance, and preparation for real-world scenarios.

 

 

Power Platform Build Tools have been available on GitHub for over a year, but did you know that there are now new GitHub actions for Power Platform? The Power Platform GitHub actions documentation is available here, along with hands-on lab content available here for users to try out.

 

So what are the new workflows that have been added to the samples folder?

 

They include:

  1. Create environments
  2. Export, Unpack, and Commit
  3. Delete environments
  4. Deploy Managed Application
  5. Deploy Unmanaged Application

Let's take a closer look at a few of them:

 

Create environment The Create Environment workflow takes a few variables as user input or when invoked remotely via Power Automate. This workflow assumes that you will create three environments - a developer environment for Dev, a sandbox environment for Test, and a production environment for Production. The assumption here is that developer environments are ephemeral, meaning you will be deleting them once you are done. If you are persisting your solutions into source control like GitHub, you can always reconstitute the developer environment from source code. In this workflow, we are creating the Developer environment and using service principals to do so. Once the environment is created, the next task is user assignment, where another user is added to the environment with similar privileges as the service principal.

 

Export, Unpack, and Commit In this workflow, we export a given solution as unmanaged, unpack it, then export the managed version of the solution, and finally commit them to the GitHub repository. When committing managed solutions to the source code repository, you are essentially checking in a DLL into source code. If you have the source code, why check in the DLL as well? You can always reconstitute it, right? However, some argue that you should export both the unmanaged and managed versions of the solution and, if all is well with the application, just proceed to deploy the managed version into Test and/or Production.

 

Delete environments In this workflow, we simply delete the Development, Test, and Production environments. When deleting environments, remember that if there is data in the environment (inside dataverse), it will be lost as well. You can use the data migration tool to export the data and check that into source code as well.

 

In conclusion, these new Power Platform workflows on GitHub add a lot of flexibility and functionality to the tasks you can perform with Power Platform. If you are a Computer Science student interested in Power Platform or DevOps, these new workflows are a great place to start experimenting with and learning about how they can be used to streamline your workflows.

 

Join April Dunnam, Principal Cloud Advocate, and Kartik Kanakasabesan, Principal Program Manager, at Microsoft, on Mar 28th to learn how #PowerPlatform can increase your productivity and free up your valuable time to focus on high impact work.

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