Dynamics 365 and Power Platform monthly reading list August 2020

Technical topics (Configuration, customization and extensibility) 

• Dynamics 365 - the cost of manual deployments
• Power Apps with Azure Application Insights (Youtube 00:39:52)
• Power Automate Dynamics 365 connector deprecation
• Power Platform Developer Saturday recordings
• The power of Dual Write (Youtube 00:52:35)
• Querying date intervals in the Common Data Service by @rappen
• Creating a flow which triggers where regarding field = lead by @benhosk
• Dynamics 365 - Problems with managed solutions out of sync versions
• Enable send direct email button in Unified Interface
• Find Created On date of solution components in solution layers
• Configure display activites in UCI with the card form by @inogic
• BPF Flow step as a trigger in CDS (current environment) connector
• Securing your HTTP triggered flow in Power Automate
• Access flow run history within a record in Dynamics 365/CDS by @LinnZawWin
• PowerApps Collections Cookbook
• Load data from SQL on premise to CDS using Power Platform dataflows

Topics for Dynamics 365 Business Application Platform consultants, project managers and power users

• Power Apps Licensing explained (Youtube) by @LisaMCrosbie
• Planning a Power Apps project
• Improve sales productivity and remote selling with sales accelerator
• T-Mobile manages company wide initiatives and more with Power Platform
• Imagine, build and deploy solutions with Microsoft Power Platform
• PowerApps the truth about $10 by @stevemordue
• Enrich  customer data with brand and interest affinities with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
• Modernizing the non-conformity management tool with Microsoft Power Platform
• Telstra citizen developers automate processes with Power Apps in Microsoft Teams, giving millions of minutes back to the business

Fixing current .NET SDK does not support targeting .Net Core 2.2 in Visual Studio 2017

 I encountered below exception when building a ASP.NET Core project in Visual Studio - "The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET Core 2.2. Either target .NET Core 2.1 or use a version of the .NET SDK that supports .NET Core 2.2".

Luckily this forum post pointed in the correct direction - first check the installed version of the .NET Core SDK on your machine. 

If you are using Visual Studio 2017, you will need to install 2.2.1xx of the SDK to support targetting .NET Core 2.2. You can download the different versions of the .NET Core 2.2 SDK on https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet-core/2.2 

Palm oil price vs SIPEF stock price in Jupyter notebooks with Quandl

Quandl also offers free commodity price data for almost 100 commodities ( See API for commodity data) so I decided to create a Jupyter notebook comparing SIPEF's stock price with the price of palm oil. Take a look at the full notebook I shared on github if you want to learn why - https://github.com/jorisp/tradingnotebooks/blob/master/Quandl_API_Euronext_SIPEFPalmOil.ipynb 

 

Remarks:

• Be careful when embedding images in a Jupyter notebook that you want to publish on Github (see Images in Markdown not showing when uploaded to Git for a discussion on this) - filenames are case sensitive - I got it working using the url syntax
• To store the quandl key I used the approach outlined on how to use secrets in Jupyter Notebooks with python-dotenv
• I really like Matplotlib and its versatility in rendering capabilities  in this notebook I used the ability to visualize multiple time series (see code preview below) with different axes. (see code below)

sipcolor = 'tab:red'
fig,ax1 = plt.subplots()

ax1.plot(data['SIP'],color=sipcolor)
ax1.set_ylabel('SIPEF',color=sipcolor)
#Instantiate a second axes that shares the same x-axis
ax2 = ax1.twinx()
ax2.plot(data['PPOIL'])
ax2.set_ylabel('PALM OIL USD')
plt.gcf().set_size_inches(15,8)
plt.show()

Related posts:

• Working with multiple time series trading data from Quandl in Jupyter Notebooks
• Using Euronext  stock data from Quandl in Jupyter Notebooks

Quick tip: workaround kernelspec module not installed with jupyter notebooks in Visual Studio Code

This weekend I tried out working with Jupyter Notebooks in Visual Studio Code. Since I already have Jupyter up and running as part of the Anaconda distro I thought this would be easy but it took me longer than expected. 

First step is to install the Python extension for VS Code  and then you can start working with existing Jupyter Notebooks by just double clicking an existing notebook. Unfortunately this immediately threw an exception "Error: Jupyter cannot be started. Error attempting to locate jupyter: 'Kernelspec' module not installed in the selected interpreter." The workaround suggested on StackOverflow Python/Jupyter notebook in VSCode does not use the right environment did not resolve the issue and also the fixes described on Github - New version tries to install kernelspec were not working.

The workaround which seems to be working for me is starting VS Code from the Anaconda Prompt in the Jupyter workspace directory by typing "code ."