Matěj Samler

Power Platform environments are usually clicked into existence - admin center, PPAC, maker portal - which means the moment you need the same setup twice, in a different region or for a different environment, you're relying on memory and screenshots. This talk treats environments, connections, DLP policies and settings as infrastructure: defined in code, reviewed in a pull request, and reproducible on demand.

Using Microsoft's official Terraform provider for Power Platform, we build an environment from nothing - provisioning, connection references, environment groups and rule-based policies - and see where Terraform's declarative model fits cleanly onto Power Platform's APIs and where it doesn't. Along the way: state management for a platform that also lets makers change things by hand, drift detection, and how this sits alongside a Dataverse solution pipeline rather than replacing it.

Less a syntax tour, more a look at what's actually happening underneath the resource blocks - and an honest account of where the provider still has gaps.

Code Apps - Power Platform's code-first canvas surface - get built and rebuilt fast, often by an AI agent that has no idea it just changed behaviour it can't see. This is the hands-on companion to that problem: using the Playwright CLI to generate real, runnable UI tests directly against a Code App, without hand-writing selectors.

We go from a blank Code App to a working test suite live: pointing the CLI at the running app, generating Playwright test code from what it finds, and wiring the result into a pipeline so every Copilot-authored change has to prove it didn't break the parts that already worked.

This is deliberately the practical half of the story - less about why AI-authored code needs a different testing approach (that's a separate talk of mine), more about the exact commands, the generated code, and where the CLI still needs a human to clean up after it.

An update to the ALM talk I've given at EPPC and Update Days, built around Code Apps: live coding a complete full stack Power Platform solution from scratch. A React Code Apps frontend in TypeScript, C# Dataverse plugins for server-side validation, custom connectors, Power Automate handling background jobs, and Package Deployer shipping all of it as one unit. The coherent architecture picture that the documentation, split across a dozen separate feature pages, doesn't give you.

You'll see the real implementation: plugins enforcing transactional safety that client-side validation can't guarantee on its own, a monorepo holding frontend and backend code together, GitHub Copilot generating across the whole stack against custom instructions, and deployment automation carrying changes from development through to production.

And the developer workflow behind it: a VS Code workspace set up for a fast local inner loop, an outer loop of automated deployments, a version control strategy for the solution files everyone forgets to plan for, and what code review looks like when an agent generated part of the change, across frontend and backend at once.