I sort of gave up forwarding news related to low code from MS, as every week there's something changing or being deprecated.
Moreover, every time I tried to use anything related to the Power Platform (so I could teach to others) I ended up in a world of pain. Is anyone actually using Power Apps, etc... Successfully?
That might be different this time, though. Afaik it's the first time Microsoft releases a user-friendly reactive language as open source; all their previous tools in this field have been strictly proprietary.
Being open source, it can be maintained by its community of users without becoming abandoned, even if Microsoft loses interest in it.
It is like they took the macro language of Excel into its own app.
Another example I made is to get Microsoft Forms answers that users submitted straight into a SQL Server DB. You literally cannot programmatically get the answers in any other way, by design. Its either logic app component or export to XLSX.
Does anyone know if it's possible to run Microsoft's low-code platform on premises? Otherwise I don't really see the point in having an open-source language.
Don't get me wrong. I do see the point in having an easily accessible business programming language. I just don't see the point in that language being open-source if it's tied to a proprietary service which I can't host myself.
Say you have two departments that need to share data, but their data stores are structured in different ways. You can build an automated process that reads data from the first data pool and converts it into the format needed at the second pool, where the other department can use it.
This is a quite common use case in machine learning for example, where data from numerous different sources need to be stored in a centralized pool ('data lake') where the ML process can analyze it to build predictions.
It feels like they're just throwing out new programming languages for no reason sometimes.
So I guess they really do support the full Microsoft experience on Mac.
It is really hard to work which sheets/rows/columns/cells are dependent of which other which sheets/rows/columns/cells. And that is before we even get to stuff like:
=FLOOR("5/"&DAY(MINUTE(YYYY/38)/2+56)&"/"&YYYY,7)-34
(and much worse)
I work at an engineering firm, and we are stuck with Excel forever. I've tried bringing in Pluto notebooks and Julia (compare with Matlab, etc.), SMath Studio (vs. MathCAD), RStudio, Python, WxMaxima, but to no avail. If Power FX is integrated with Excel and Access, I could see it being useful for us.
GPT-3 is not mentioned again in the announcement. What is exactly is it being used for?
For anyone who has used this, how does the performance of Power FX compare to a comparably-difficult formula calculation in Excel?
If you are looking for an open source alternative to Powerapps - check out Budibase [1][2]
[1] https://github.com/Budibase/budibase
I am happy to remove this post, as it is slightly promotional, but I do feel it is very relevant.
Powerapps - very reliant on microsoft ecosystem (sharepoint, excel) Powerapps - uses Power fx Powerapps - mostly made for tablet and mobile apps Powerapps - private apps + portal Powerapps - i think powerapps makes use of another Microsoft tool for automation
I feel the components and outputted apps are better within Budibase. PowerApps is more mature than Budibase so it has an ecosystem of consultants
Source: have observed dozens of regular users through one-way mirror _while at MS_ ~18 years ago. The product later became Dynamics. Users would struggle to find the extremely prominent "OK" button sometimes, or press whichever button was highlighted by default even when they didn't mean to. Anything more complicated than that, it' completely hopeless.
Their own user testing probably shows the same thing, and that's probably why it's open source.
That was my first impression (seeing this for the first time today). In an "all built on top of js" world you might just make a snapshot of the entire stack (except for the "browser substitute") part of the document. Make "open new document" essentially the equivalent of github fork from an ever evolving "the empty document" template. You might see quite an impressive reward from moving fast and breaking things instead of sticking to the paradigm of eternal 20th century compatibility.
I noticed the same thing (technical spreadsheet users) and built Wax[0] to make it easier to build apps on top of Google Sheets.
My Windows boxes usually run about 12 to 14 days between (manual!) reboots, and those reboots are normally done to switch between operating systems.
It's been literally years since Microsoft removed automatic reboots and even updates can be be postponed for several weeks and scheduled at the user's convenience.
There are plenty of bad things about Windows, but tired old stories about "random reboots" or bluescreens just aren't part of it anymore.
