I've been working heavily in what I've dubbed the POWERStack for the past 13 months for a consulting client. Front end = power apps, back end = power automate + some cloud powershell (azure automation runbooks), database = sharepoint lists, sql (for initializing/iterating on complex lists) = local powershell.
As for Power Fx, in one particularly fun PowerAutomate flow I crafted for them, I wrote the following one liner to display a "percent complete" value for a given employee with regards to trainings they'd taken vs. trainings they were expected to have taken for OSHA compliance purposes. Parsing it is left as an exercise for the reader:
Overall, I rate the POWERStack 8/10. It's not perfect, but it's fairly robust, not too difficult to reason about, and there are more than enough enterprise clients married to Microsoft to keep me in business for the foreseeable future. My only requests are to let me code Power Apps and Power Automate Flows fully in code-behind. I get that they're low-code tools by design, but in practice, they make things more difficult than they need to be for those of us who are quite happy to live in code, and I'd like to be able to build tools for automating the process for updating/adding functionalities to existing powerapps for those stakeholders that are on the absolutely-not-a-single-line-of-code-ever end of the development skill tree. Otherwise my business (in the Microsoft space) will remain bottlenecked by my time, and I'll have to dig elsewhere for my "set it and forget it" income stream.
If you need help building things with these tools/in this environment, feel free to reach out.
As for Power Fx, in one particularly fun PowerAutomate flow I crafted for them, I wrote the following one liner to display a "percent complete" value for a given employee with regards to trainings they'd taken vs. trainings they were expected to have taken for OSHA compliance purposes. Parsing it is left as an exercise for the reader:
formatNumber(add(mul(float(div(sub( length(variables('TrainingsConducted')) , sub(length(split(variables('IncompleteTrainings'),';')),1)),float(length(variables('TrainingsConducted'))))),float(100)),float(0.5)),'##')
Low code, indeed.
Overall, I rate the POWERStack 8/10. It's not perfect, but it's fairly robust, not too difficult to reason about, and there are more than enough enterprise clients married to Microsoft to keep me in business for the foreseeable future. My only requests are to let me code Power Apps and Power Automate Flows fully in code-behind. I get that they're low-code tools by design, but in practice, they make things more difficult than they need to be for those of us who are quite happy to live in code, and I'd like to be able to build tools for automating the process for updating/adding functionalities to existing powerapps for those stakeholders that are on the absolutely-not-a-single-line-of-code-ever end of the development skill tree. Otherwise my business (in the Microsoft space) will remain bottlenecked by my time, and I'll have to dig elsewhere for my "set it and forget it" income stream.
If you need help building things with these tools/in this environment, feel free to reach out.