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Want to play with predicting the upcoming future of Dynamics 365? Good luck with that 🙂
World of Dynamics 365 is changing rapidly. I feel like yesterday we were stuck in plugins, custom apps, web resources and javascripts (or typescripts) when doing big and complicated projects. I know that Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) is here for some time but it gained traction this year with the introduction of new connectors especially the new CDS connectors. Before that the functionality was very limited and if you were looking for optimized solutions you still had to develop things yourself.
So, what has changed in the Dynamics 365 world?
I would say everything. I’m not going to talk about the platform, we all can check release notes, but I’d like to focus on the way the platform changed our way of working and there are significant changes here. Developers are no longer the majority of our project teams. When we were planning projects and assessing requirements, we were looking on what needs extending/custom development. Now we look on what can be customized.
We have more technical consultants capable of leveraging the platform to produce the same effect that the developers did last year. This is a huge shift. So, do we really need developers in Dynamics projects? That is a topic for another article, but let’s look on what
My predictions?
I will focus only on the things that will impact the way we work, not focusing on the direction of the whole Power Platform.
- Web resources will be replaced by PCF (the obvious one)
- Developers will be able to write custom business rules
- Custom filters on subgrids 🙂
- Canvas apps will be designed in Visual Studio (or a dedicated desktop app)
- Plugins will be replaced by sync version of Power Automate
Why?
Why those? It looks like a natural move forward, improvements to the existing functionalities expanding them. Building new features on solid foundations.
Web resources will be replaced by PCF (the obvious one)
This one is rather obvious. Microsoft stated that web resources are here to stay and they are not planning to deprecate them anytime soon, but my guess is that they will stop any further development in this area and let the html web resources slowly die as they did with dialogs. They will monitor the adoption rate of PCF vs html web resource and depricate when the time is right.
Developers will be able to write custom business rules
Business rules are OK, you can do quite complex stuff with them, but they have their limits. It is frustrating when you get to that limit and realise you must redo everything in javascript from scratch. It also doesn’t support form state which is one of the reasons why we have to rely on scripts. I personally like to have an order and not mix technologies. From support and maintenance perspective I like to have everything in one place and that usually means C#/typescript code in code repository. It is easier to verify what is going on and why something is not working (and who to blame thanks to having everything in code repository). I imagine that in the future we will be able to create our own components (possibly in typescript) that will be usable in business rules.
Custom filters on subgrids 🙂
This is my wishful thinking not a real prediction, but ever since I started working with Dynamics it was a huge issue with the subgrids. We are able to provide custom filters on the lookup field, but we can’t provide one for the OOTB subgrids. I know that PCF is a way to get past this (to some extent) but it would be really nice if we could finally control the grid.
Canvas apps will be designed in Visual Studio (or a dedicated desktop app)
Writing complex canvas apps is a separate topic and I will share my thoughts on what works and what doesn’t when developing a real life app for the customer. But just answer one question: if you need to create a complex document/spreadsheet/presentation do you use web versions of Office of dedicated desktop apps? 😉
Plus having it in IDE like Visual Studio will allow us to use DevOps and work on the same app in parallel.
Plugins will be replaced by sync version of Power Automate
This might be a stretch, since Power Automate is not designed to run synchronously but seeing how the new connectors work, I see a big resemblance to the way we design plugins. I don’t believe that Microsoft will change the engine behind PA to allow sync calls, but rather they are working on another engine dedicated to synchronous flows that will be part of Power Automate, use the same connectors and the same UI. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
What are your predictions? Would you like to guess (no peeking into Microsoft docs ;))?
