Today we’re back with a new guest blog post. It’s from one of our preday-workshop trainers, you might know her as PCF Lady and you might recognize the below icon from her blog.

Let’s welcome Diana Birkelbach to this blog!

Diana is one of 6 pre-day workshop instructors we have at Nordic Summit in Copenhagen this September!

Why join my course?

I’ve got this feedback from attendees in the past: “I’ve got everything I needed to know to start with PCF development” and I hope you’ll feel ready too. Because that’s what I’m trying to do: share everything I would have wanted to know when I’ve started with PCF development; everything but compressed in one day.

Why is this technology great?

PCFs are everywhere in Power Platform: Canvas Apps, Custom Pages, Model-Driven Apps or Power Pages. In this workshop we’ll learn how to design a PCF component considering the integration with Power Platform. The time of creating huge HTMLWebResources is over; we can create now smaller PCFs and let them communicate with the form, views, commands in model-driven apps, or glue them with PowerFx in Canvas Apps or Custom Pages.

Of course, we won’t only talk about PCFs; we’ll also get the hands “dirty” and develop together. The labs will concentrate on PCFs specific aspects, rather than complex development.

And there is also a special type of PCF “Power Apps Grid customizer control”; the developers for model-driven apps will know to appreciate its power. There is very few documentation on this available but I’ve tried out quite a lot; let’s see together how far we can get.

Who is this workshop for?

The workshop is for Developers and Solution Architects who sympathize with coding, interested to design a PCF or integrate a PCF with the ALM process.

As a developer you’ll get ready to begin with PCF development, but also to deepen the PCF knowledge.

As a pre-requirement you only need to know JavaScript and HTML. We’ll use TypeScript, but you can follow the labs without TypeScript knowledge. I’ll keep the code simple, and use only a little React, but you can keep up with the content without having previous React knowledge.

What’s the content of the workshop?

We’ll cover the PCF basics and extended aspects:

1. Field and dataset PCF
2. PCF Project setup
3. Field PCF: properties, manifest, updateView lifecycle, getOutputs, assets
4. Standard vs Virtual Components
5. Debugging
6. ALM considerations
7. Field PCF extended: disabled state, object output, zoom to full-screen , caching, translations…
8. Dataset PCF: data, property-set, dataset sdk (columns, filter, linking, paging, sorting), save changes, command interaction
9. Power Apps Grid customizer control
10. PCF design discussion

What’s your favourite song?

I cannot pick just one. There is a lot of awesome music out there. I can’t even choose one favourite singer or band. I listen from Depeche Mode to Shawn Mendes, Ed Sheeran or Sam Smith. I follow treasures discovered at European Song Contest like Måns Zelmerlöw. I’ve learned about KPop about 10 years ago, and I’m a fan since then: love JYJ, BTS, Stray kids (was even to an awesome BTS concert in Paris together with my daughter 😊). But I also love to dance Zumba on latin music.

It doesn’t matter which direction, I always enjoy listening music when I’m programming: I put the earbuds on and have fun.

Have you been to Copenhagen before? What are you looking forward to seeing?

I have never been to Copenhagen. I’m looking forward to a beautiful conference location and to meet the Power Platform Community (of course including the other MVPs). I’m planning to extend my stay in Copenhagen and have a short holiday together with the family. I’m sure it will be great!

Thank you Diana for your guest post, we look forward to seeing you in Copenhagen soon!