Power Platform Development

How the COMET team delivers Power Platform at CMS — OIT-built apps and Developer-as-a-Service under governed GCC Entra tenants, environment-level DLP/connector guardrails, and dev→test→prod per-app environments.

Practical design and release guidance for avoiding data, delegation, performance, accessibility, security, and ALM mistakes in custom Power Apps canvas applications.

Reference pattern for a Power Automate flow that lets a Canvas app export Dataverse data to Excel, save the generated file to a SharePoint document library, and download it directly to the user's browser.

How the BaseCamp Dataverse plugin synchronizes HC, TA, and FA values from Assigned People records to the Application table.

Experience-based guidance for building Power Platform Canvas apps at CMS, with a focus on responsive design, accessibility, reusable components, data architecture, ALM, and security.

Beginner-friendly guidance for managing Canvas App fonts and control styles from one location, with separate configurations for form headers, form labels, and confirmation messages.

Beginner-friendly implementation guidance for opening a Canvas App on a requested screen, loading a record by URL parameter, and restricting access to contributor users.

Troubleshooting guidance for delegation warnings when a Canvas App gallery uses a composite Dataverse filter with a date column and a user lookup field.

Troubleshooting guidance for Canvas Apps that work on Windows and tablets but do not resize or reflow correctly on mobile devices, even when responsive containers are used.

Troubleshooting guidance for Canvas Apps that save data while offline but do not synchronize records to the data source after the device reconnects to the network.

How to set up and use the official Microsoft Power Platform Playwright toolkit for end-to-end testing of Canvas Apps at CMS, including GCC environment configuration, certificate auth, and Canvas-specific flakiness helpers.

How to use containers in Canvas Apps to create predictable keyboard tab order across buttons, icons, and navigation controls so the app is accessible and Section 508 friendly.

Why the out-of-the-box Confirm() function renders as a native browser dialog in the CMS GCC environment, breaking accessibility and styling, and how to replace it with a custom overlay modal that supports focus management and screen readers.

Required tools, plugins, and configuration for Power Platform development at CMS — pac CLI, az CLI, MS Power Platform Skills extension for Codex, and telemetry opt-out.

Troubleshooting guidance for Power Platform solutions that retain source-environment configuration values after import, causing flows and apps to reference the wrong URLs, endpoints, or settings.

Personal PCF notes captured from a demo and follow-up experience: what PCF is, where it fits, how to build and debug it, and the workflow rules that kept showing up.

Practical workarounds for DLP policies and connector restrictions observed in the CMS GCC environment: exporting to Excel without the HTTP connector, avoiding data: URI issues, and using OneDrive as an HTML-to-PDF conversion path.

Fixes for recurring Power Automate errors hit during CMS builds: PicklistValueOutOfRange, Dataverse Choice column formatted values, Filter array advanced mode syntax, and switch() misuse.

Troubleshooting guidance for Power Automate flows that import successfully but fail to trigger in the target environment due to unresolved connections, environment variables, or flow state.

Self-contained build reference for Power Pages sites (plus Dataverse and Power Automate) in the CMS GCC / US Gov tenant: environment, tooling, patterns, limitations, and the gotchas that bite. Most important: a Private site blocks all client-side reads — read-heavy sites must run Public + Entra-required.