Announcing Powerful Devs Conference + Hack Together 2025

Gomolemo Mohapi — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 20:54:11 +0000

We are excited to invite you to participate in this year’s Powerful Devs Conference + Hack Together, starting on February 12, 2025. The conference will be followed by a two-week Hack Together, ending on February 28, 2025. Join us to unleash your creativity and build innovating solutions! In collaboration with the Power Platform community, our goal is to create an unparalleled experience for developers seeking to harness the full capabilities of the Power Platform for enterprise application development.

About Powerful Devs Conference

In our one-day online Powerful Devs Conference on February 12, 2025, we will share how developers can leverage the Power Platform to build applications smarter, faster, and with less effort. We’ll explore how the Power Platform – from Power Apps and Power Automate to Dataverse, AI Builder, and Copilot Studio – enables you to create powerful, AI-centric enterprise solutions. Discover how AI and Copilot are transforming app development, allowing you to build sophisticated, secure applications that drive business value. You’ll have the opportunity to connect with industry recognized Pro Dev influencers, Microsoft Cloud Advocates, trusted and diverse community leaders, and members of the Power Platform team.

Our incredible hosts, Scott Durow and Kendra Springer, who bring their expertise, energy and passion to the stage will guide you through a day packed with insightful sessions. The day kicks off with a keynote by Leon Welicki as he dives into the world of intelligent apps and processes and explores how professional developers can leverage the Power Platform and AI to build secure, enterprise-level solutions. This will then be followed by an incredible lineup of sessions from learning how to harness generative AI in Copilot Studio to building cross-platform apps with Dataverse and .NET MAUI and even scaling solutions for millions of users. Our agenda is designed to inspire and equip developers at every level.

Don’t miss this chance to see how the Power Platform empowers you to build the future of enterprise applications!

The full list of sessions can be viewed here.

About Powerful Devs Hack Together

The Powerful Devs Hack Together is a 2-week global online hackathon where you’ll have the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned from the conference to build smarter, faster solutions with less effort. This will run from February 13-28, 2025 at https://aka.ms/PowerfulDevs/Hack. Be sure to star the repo!

Hack Together is open to anyone who wants to explore the endless possibilities of using the Power Platform for enterprise app development. It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner, advanced maker, admin or a professional developer – all are welcome! Check out solutions submitted from the last Hack Together and get inspired to build something that’s innovative with AI.

We’ll have additional sessions during the Hack Together covering AI, automation, security, extensibility and so much more. These sessions will inspire you to get your creative juices flowing and help you turn your ideas into impactful solutions.

You can register here for both the Conference and Hack Together sessions!

Prizes and categories

Yes, we have prizes for the 8 winning projects from the Hack Together in the categories listed below! Each winning team will receive a cash prize of $550! Projects will be evaluated by a panel of judges comprised of Microsoft engineers, product managers, and developer advocates. Judging criteria will include innovation, impact, technical usability, and alignment with each corresponding hackathon category listed here.

Best Overall
Best in Power
Best in Integrations
Best in Automation
Best in Applications
Best in Agents
Best in Pages
Best in AI

Learn more about the rules and regulations in this video

How can you participate?

To participate in Hack Together, you must register for the event at https://aka.ms/powerfuldevs/register. Registering for any of the sessions counts as a registration for the hackathon. You will also need to have your own access to a Microsoft 365 account with a Power Platform license. Once you have registered and have access to the Power Platform, you can start building your solution! We’ve created a Learn Collection to help you get started: https://aka.ms/PowerfulDevs/Learn.

You should also join the Hack Together community hereby starring the repo! We will be communicating hereregarding further information and updates related to the hack, including Office Hours, Session Q & A, Project Submission Guidelines, Winner Announcements, and more! You can also find getting starting and learning resources on this page, and you will submit your final solution here.

Introduce yourself and join the conversation at https://aka.ms/PowerfulDevs/Hack/Discussions to ask questions, share ideas, and get feedback from Microsoft experts and other participants. You can look for teammates for the Hack Together as well!

Your team can then submit your solution in GitHub Issues at any time before February 28, 2025 at 11:59 PM PST. You need to provide a short video demo of your solution, a brief description of the problem statement, the solution overview, and any other relevant details. You can submit your project using the Project Submission Form. Project submission guidelines can be found in the GitHub Repo at aka.ms/PowerfulDevs/Hack.

So, what are you waiting for? Register now and start hacking! We can’t wait to see what you create! 😊

If you’re looking for more info about the event, check out our site for all the details: aka.ms/powerfuldevs.

Podcast Copilot with Azure OpenAI Service, .NET, and Power Platform Workshop Series

Gomolemo Mohapi — Tue, 07 May 2024 18:26:31 +0000

Unlocking Value with the Power Platform

For years now, the Power Platform has been a low code tool that unlocks value across your business by accelerating application & automation development to meet business demand faster. Whether you’re a professional developer, an IT admin, business analyst, or a non-technical employee, low code empowers you to create solutions in a fast, secure, and compliant fashion. Now with the rise of AI, organizations are moving quickly to embrace AI in order to usher in a new wave of growth and value creation.

Introducing the Podcast Copilot with Azure OpenAI Service, .NET, and Power Platform Workshop

With that, I am excited to announce an exciting workshop that explores the integration of the Power Platform with advanced AI models to create a dynamic application inspired by Kevin Scott’s Microsoft Build 2023 demo. This application makes it easy to generate a social media post promoting a new episode of your podcast.

Starting from the podcast URL, you get the transcription with the Whisper model
Given that transcript, you use GPT to extract the name of the guest
With the guest name, you retrieve their bio with Bing Search
With the transcription and the guest bio, you generate a social media blurb with GPT
With the social media blurb, you generate a relevant DALL-E prompt with GPT
Finally, you use DALL-E to generate an image for the social media post with the prompt

Then you’ll learn how to surface this process in a Power App or through a copilot using Microsoft Copilot Studio all powered by Azure OpenAI Service, .NET and the Power Platform!

What can you expect from this workshop?

This workshop walks you through the entire process from start to finish with the following labs:

👩🏾‍💻 Lab 0 - Setup your environment

This lab is all about setting up your environment. This is what you need to get started. Make sure to do this before starting the workshop.

🤖 Lab 1 - Laying the Foundation: Azure OpenAI Service

In this lab, we're going to dive into the world of Azure OpenAI Service. We introduce the service, describe the models, and guide you through creating deployments. Setting the stage for seamless AI integration.

🔧 Lab 2 - Bridging the Gap: .NET APIs and Custom Connectors

In this lab, we take a step further from Lab 1 by creating a .NET API using the .NET Azure OpenAI SDK and creating a Custom Connector from Visual Studio.

📱 Lab 3 – The Final Touch: Power Apps and Microsoft Copilot Studio Integration

In this lab, we bring it all together. We will build the Power App UI, connect to the Custom Connector, and create the AI generated social media post. As a bonus, we will also see how to implement this workflow with Microsoft Copilot Studio as well.

Video Walkthroughs

There are also video walkthroughs of each lab for those who prefer visual learning. They are embedded into the start of each lab and are currently hosted on the Microsoft Developer YouTube channel as part of our Low Code Revolution Series.

You can watch all video walkthroughs here:

Setting up the Azure OpenAI Service

.NET APIs and Custom Connectors

Power Apps and Microsoft Copilot Studio Integration

How can you get started?

You can find the workshop by visiting: https://aka.ms/PowerPodcastCopilot. If you have any questions, feel free to submit a GitHub Issue and we’ll follow up with you in the repository.

Happy Building! 😀

DEV Community: Gomolemo Mohapi