Welcome to the MVP show . My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills . If you have not checked it out already , I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP . The link is in the show notes . With that , let's get on with the show .
Today's guest is from Denmark . He works at Delegate as a Managing Specialist . He was the first award as MVP in 2022 . He has got the nickname of XRM tooling wizard for creating developer tools . His goal is to bring best practice from both the academic and the real world into the world of business applications .
You can find links to his bio and social media , et cetera , in the show notes for this episode . Welcome to the show , Magnus .
Thank you , thank you .
I'm pleased to have you on Like . I remember observing you at MVP Summit . I call you the flashiest dressed MVP in the game . You always look smart , put together on point .
I always feel comfortable in a suit . You know I come from a consultancy background and it's sort of part of the uniform and of course if you have off the rack suits it's not as comfortable . But I have tailored suits so it's comfortable in any weather at all .
So yeah , very very classy , Very very classy Tell me about food , family and fun .
Oh , food , I love food , just any food at all . My favorite food is just buffet . You know , if you ask anyone , they'll tell you how much I slaughter food . I've had a lot of issues with that . When I was pretty inactive I gained some weight . But during my paternity leave I walked a lot with my daughter and I think I lost 10 kilos or something like that .
Yeah , yeah , just walking . I walked 600 kilometers in . You're American , what is a kilometer ? But 600 kilometers in like two months or something .
Kilometers works . I'm not American , I'm Kiwi , so we are in kilometers . Perfect , that's perfect , nice nice .
Wow , that's a lot of walking . And yeah , I have my wife . We met in high school , so stuck with her ever since . Still love each other for some reason . We're insane like that and our daughter just turned one year just a week ago .
Very cool , very cool , I love .
Denmark yeah , I love it as well .
I don't want to leave . So my wife and I were in Denmark and we had an Airbnb and we did a design thinking exercise on the wall to set out where we wanted to be in the future and we put up all our dreams , aspirations , desires . We'd been traveling the world for some time at this point .
We recently went and looked at the photos that we'd taken in that Airbnb . Every one of our dreams have come true . Every one of the things we you know we didn't own any house , property , land , we didn't have children All the things that we desired in our careers , and everything .
Everything came to pass that we put in our like our five , 10 year vision , that we put up in that Airbnb in Denmark , in Copenhagen .
Crazy , crazy . So just the atmosphere , it's the atmosphere man , it's a great city .
I've got two nephews that are Danish . My brother married multiple Danish women over his life . He seemed to have a taste for them , and so , yeah , I've got two Danish nephews . They'd be in their late 20s now . One's in the military there and the other one's into , uh , audio production . Um , but , yeah , yeah , yeah , yeah , so I do .
I do have a , uh , a connection to denmark . Tell me about how you got into tech uh .
So I originally thought , you know , when I was in what was that 9th grade ? Or something that I was going to do a lot with money and finance and so on .
But then there was this high school teacher in the first year of high school that showed me I could do websites and build them on my own , and I was gaming a lot back then 12-14 hours a day in world of warcraft so having a job that you can do on your computer sounded perfect for me . So began building websites for small businesses .
Uh , began building apps and so on and uh , yeah , things just rolled from there . Yeah , things just rolled from there . Became a dynamics developer during my university studies and began building tools from there . Yeah , just stuck with it ever since .
So when you say dynamics , are you on the F&O or CE side ?
CE side . Yeah , funny thing about that , though . I've never touched a first-party product in my life .
Wow , so you just do model-driven apps , so you use a clean dataverse . Perfect thing about that though I've never touched the first party product in my life . Wow , so just you do , you just do model driven apps so you use clean dataverse perfect , perfect . Um , it's uh , I love that . I love that .
Tell me about xrm tooling wizard yeah , the idea was just , you know , I saw everyone who had some fancy name and then I thought , the people that I saw who built tools , they built you know one or two , but at that point as a student I I had built one and I was maintaining three others .
So I mean I I thought I could grab that and then later on I just dropped the tooling part of it because I mean I knew a lot about the platform anyway . So I mean I loved Harry Potter and XM Wizard seemed fine .
So I love it .
I love it . I also didn't use LinkedIn for anything at that point , so my LinkedIn tag is also XM Wizard . I don't know when that's going to bite my ass at some point in 40 years or something .
But I think it's very cool . I mean you can change it at any time and so you know when you look at what you do in the community , kind of what are you known for .
What do people come to you for ? Deep technical knowledge ? I would say so . So my , the tool that I've built is just a copy of a dataverse basically . So it like fake XMEC .
It knows how to run business logic from Dataverse locally so developers can test stuff without contacting a real environment , and in that I have had to experiment a lot with what Dataverse can do and all the quirks and so on . So of course that gains you some knowledge .
I have built an interpreter for the old classical workflows so on , so of course that gains you some knowledge , like I've built an interpreter for the old classical workflows so they can run locally . That was a lot of fun , you know , pulling out the definitions of the workflow and looking at how it works and so on .
So when you did that , did you kind of because that was built on Windows Workflow Foundation , right . So do you have a local instance of that running ? Are you using that or did you create a full new version ?
Just create my own custom interpreter in C Sharp . So taking that SAML definition , compiling it over to some classes In academia , you would call it an abstract syntax tree and then you run an interpreter on that and then , yeah , then you have an interpreter . It took two months to build . You know as my part-time stuff doing as a study .
That's epic . So what are your thoughts between Power Automate and what was provided in that workflow tool that was part of the original Dynamics product .
The most sad part is that Power Automate is asynchronous . So if you want to Google my name , you can probably find some super old article where , when Power Automate came out , I said that it would suck , it wouldn't scale and so on .
And the whole point is that if all of your business logic is running asynchronously , your data quality is going to go bad , and that was the great part about the classical workflows was that they can run synchronously .
You know they only could run synchronously . I thought towards the end . I don't remember the OG product having the synchronous functionality , like back in 20 crm4 days and things like that .
Now it could be wrong , but I thought , but at least the 2011 , they had it so yeah , yeah power debate is pretty old by that standard , so they haven't followed suit so , so .
So let's unpack this because it was interesting .
Ryan cunningham coined this term in the fullness of time that it would achieve that , and Steven Siciliano , who then was the Power Automate owner for some time , coined that some years ago when it first came out , because our biggest complaint was when are you going to give us parity with what we had with Windows Workflow Foundation in Power Automate ?
Was , when are you going to give us parity with what we had with windows workflow foundation in power automate ? And of course , we're now . What ? Uh ? 2017 , 2016 ? That's a long time ago , right where ? And it still hasn't come about . Why do you think it's one not being a desire from the product team to get the synchronous functionality in there ?
Is it just too big a challenge for them to solve in the architecture they've created with Power Automate ?
I mean we've also created we . I say I have a colleague who created an interpreter and I gave him comments on it for CloudFlows . So there's a pretty big difference in how they're written .
They are much more abstract , so it's easier for them to add more connections and so on , but it also means that it's harder for you to run an interpreter that doesn't spin up stuff . So , inherently , power Automate interpreting is slower than classic workflows . Currently , power Automate interpreting is slower than classic workflows .
So I think a much more fast and easy transition would be the low-code plugins or whatever they might be called in the future . Right ?
Okay , so is that the future way to do things you're thinking ?
Yeah , I think so .
Low-code plugins addresses the scenario and the problem , though , I suppose , with the low-code plugins , which you didn't have with Workload Foundation , was a GUI that allowed a quote citizen developer to build them .
But I think with natural language , helping writing formulas and so on , I think having a GUI is more of a hindrance than just having something helping out writing formulas . I think the actual media that we interact with will change in the next five to 10 years anyway .
I think everything will be more abstract , right , but the Power Fx will have the same strength in that it can use all the connections , but it's inherently more lightweight .
So if you think that you can still have named formulas and so on so you can break down your big complex logic , but you can still do the same stuff that you can call the environment , so you can call custom APIs or actions that you can patch and retrieve and so on , the real big gap right now is that the triggers are not as sophisticated as plugins .
If there was full parity for these local plugins as plugins , that they can have access to the same plugin execution context , then I don't see a reason why a lot of the simple stuff wouldn't be written in that Interesting , and why do you think that is not there ? I just think it hasn't been a focus .
I mean , you must also have realized that as long as as well as everyone who's listening that AI has been a great focus . I think everything that was on the board two years ago has been pushed .
But looking at the release wave that we've seen now , it seems like they're picking up steam again and actually fixing stuff on the platform , but there's been a one and a half year gap .
So I made a prediction last week that Power Automate will disappear into the background in the next five years . Developer or configurer .
Because I believe that , as speech becomes ubiquitous in how we interact with AI , that although AI will build out the automations for us , there will be no need for us to go in and build out an automation as such as that we would , you know , maybe hit a record button on our screen and show kind of what's already been proposed , or literally just talk to it
and say I need an automation that does this and it might , you know , schematic that up on screen for you and you might yeah , I need this to happen at this point and basically verbally go through and then behind the scenes , it'll go okay , I need these connectors to do that , and then , if they're not , don't exist , it'll build them and , and you know , you'll
provide access to data sets etc . Um , it'll have a full formula engine in it . Blah , blah , blah . Do you see that ? That's , you know , the , the demand . For you know , in the last five , ten years I've seen a lot of people put you know their power automate guru on their profiles and stuff and really built a brand around that .
Do you see it all kind of just disappearing into the background . As in that , ai will be our interface .
It depends on how slow we as consultancies and so on are changing , but I definitely think that the future is that direction . The future will be that systems describe how data should be understood in their domain , and so that would be kind of closed source . So let's say you have a warehouse system In your system .
You know what an item is in a warehouse , but how an item gets in there . You might have a single interface for adding items . But from the rest of the business perspective , you don't really care .
Your solution that you've built still on Dataverse , still on so on , you have all your business logic that runs , hopefully , synchronously , so your data remains intact , is is full of your domain knowledge , and then you have these points in .
And that's where your point is right that right now we would put your Power Automate guru in there and have them describe exactly how these different systems should connect . I definitely think that layer will be blurred out .
As long as your warehouse system can describe how to interact with it well enough , such that an AI can interact with it , there's no reason why you need the logic .
Have you looked at semantic kernel ?
No , I don't think so .
So Microsoft announced it in July this year and it's pretty mind-blowing because I watched last week a demonstration of a shopping cart scenario where somebody says you know , the shopping cart metaphor , right , based on kind of a supermarket checkout , is cumbersome and particularly if you're elderly , right as a necessary , understand that , and so I noticed this example .
So , using voice interaction , it said you know , somebody goes to the websites that has a catalog of products and just said I need some boots . And they showed that in semantic kernel . Well , what's a boot ? Right ? So , using generative AI , then it can say a boot is this type of thing .
Oh , we , and you hand that to the API , the product API , and says okay , do you have a product that has a dimension called boot ? Yeah , I do . Well , can you display those on screen ? Great , there they are . I want a black boot ? Well , it has no concept of black , yellow , green , but we can go , hang on a second . What is black ?
And your generative AI goes well , black is a color , is a color . And so , okay , do we have a dimension called black ? Yeah , here's a , you know , and all of a sudden , the way you're going to interact becomes pretty compelling , right ?
Well , I'll have two of those and , by the way , just use my credit card to to complete the , the purchase , rather than you know . And you might have a validator saying put your cv , cvc or whatever it is , you know code in what . Might have a validator saying put your CVC or whatever it is , you know code in what is it and it just give it to you .
It might give it to you auditory and all of a sudden the way we can create experiences for people massively changes by using this kind of . So check out Semantic Kernel . Anyhow , I'm a big fan because it's kernel . Anyhow , I'm a big fan because it's very human , readable code and what it gets , what's generated .
And I just see a lot of runway in the area of the power , platform dynamics , that type of thing of where this is going to be incredibly powerful tool to create new experiences yeah , and of course it's .
it's easy to get hyped right . My big worry is that I can see the vision . I can see that there will no longer be a Canvas app , a model-driven app . You just have a blank screen and it auto-generates whatever UI you want . But I am much more interested in how close are we now ?
How close is Code Interpreter in ChatGPT to be able to generate a React app for me that can interact with an API ? It's not there yet , but I would love for these examples to be what we study , because it's super easy to talk about five to ten years . Who the fuck is going to check up ?
Yeah , exactly right .
It's much easier to figure out . What can you do now ? You can point Copilot to your Dataverse database and it can answer some stuff . It can probably not answer stuff if you have a complex table structure . So it's not there yet .
It can probably get there , but there are a lot of scenarios , like user guidance , where you can point it to some documentation you have and so on . That might be a good idea . How do I do stuff ? Well , if you have written pretty good documentation , why not just give it to Copilot and then it can figure it out ? So a lot of these .
I need to read a lot of documents in order to understand something . It can do that now , and I'm guessing you must have read a lot of the examples of different businesses that are using generative AI now in success A lot of them . We've also built a bunch of these systems .
They have a lot of cases and usually there are a lot of documents tied to it , and it makes it a lot easier for them to read a summary from generative AI and then they can dig into the documents if they need to , rather than they have to figure it out , and a lot of these cases also have pretty short SLAs , which allows them to actually read through stuff
and maybe win more cases and so on . Maybe , yeah , solve them faster or at least you know , do them thoroughly enough , follow company policy and so on , a lot of these different companies . They aren't following their own compliance internally because there's not enough time , right ?
So that is what we can do now , and I'm much more interested in what is the next six months in the year , because I don't think anyone knows any more than that anyway .
Yeah . So with that in mind , final question for you is what are you learning , what are you studying ? What is your focus ? That is only six months out .
Right now it is a lot on how we can do so . It's not AI focused at all . Actually , it's how we can get to the actual treat your environments as cattle and not kittens story . So Microsoft has been pushing this narrative a lot , that they want you to spin up environments whenever you create a new feature and then merge it in and then deploy it .
But the story hasn't really been there . But I do believe that in the next six months to a year we will get to that point and I can do my part from community tooling that a lot of community tooling right now needs an environment to run .
But if the stuff that is stored inside of your version control is good enough , in a good enough format , then we can also point to that instead . Stuff that is stored inside of your version control is good enough in a good enough format , then we can also point to that instead .
And if the act of spinning up new environments becomes faster , if we can configure them correctly , then it becomes much faster and safer to be a lot of developers on the same team . So right now I'm on a project where I think we are 15 , 17 developers on the same environment , right , and we are stomping on each other's toes .
We have reduced the stomping a lot because we can do local testing and so on , but we're still creating these fields on the same entities . That will just cause problems . So that is my focus I want environments to be cattle .
How do you solve that ? Because what you just described there , I can remember in CRM four days that being a problem .
In this case it would be three different Microsoft partners working with the same customer and you would get this overwriting happen of solutions or customizations built in the system , being the last person in wins type thing , and it would create problems . How far down the solved path are we ?
wins type thing and it would create problems . How far down the solved path are we ? We will be far down soon . So the reason I can't say specifics is that it's a private preview running right now , but it should have been announced last week , I think so . So it's out soon . It's the new uh git solution structure , right , it's .
It's in the release wave , so we can say that much um . But that story will become much better . And previously it's only been a demand from a developer point of view , because we know better I mean , get off my high horse and so on . But we know how software development can be done in parallel because we have version control and stuff like that .
And if that story gets better from a platform point of view and it becomes easy for people who just sit inside Make , then the storytelling gets better at least . And it's also something I will talk about in the new year at different conferences , because it is such a pain that you can't be many developers on the same project , right .
And yeah , just the last part that I don't expect Microsoft to fix is just the community tooling part . If we have a good enough story that matches what Microsoft is doing , then we'll also keep investing in it . That's how it's always been .
Hey , thanks for listening . I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith , otherwise known as the NZ365 guy . If you like the show and want to be a supporter , check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy . Thanks again and see you next time . Thank you .