Microsoft Power Platform blog posts updates and improvement suggestions

[hjaf]

Wrong publishing author and date

The blog post list appears to show who updated the post, but only the posts original author and date can be seen when reading the post which rather confusing:

Blog post list view author and date

Blog post read view author and date

Disabled and confusing comment section.


The comments, which I assume are there for users to provide feedback, have been disabled some time ago and is related to some early version of the post. As long as it is not clear which version of the post they are related to, it just adds to the confusion. 

Unrelated comments section

Misleading or unsubstantiated claims that undermine the preview feature disclaimer


The highlighted part might have been correct for some earlier version of this example, but this was not the case for the changes documented in this posts update, where a lot of functionality from the previous version of the feature did break after all. 
I am not saying that breaking changes to preview features is the issue, as we should expect things to break when using them. But unverified or ambiguous statements like this can give the wrong impression that preview features are safer to use than what they are, which is undermining the preview feature disclaimer in my view.

Unverified claims

Suggestions

• Make it obvious for readers to see when post has been changed, who changed it and preferably have a change log. I believe there is value of blogs that showcase changes to a product, especially if they can be used as a timeline. 
This can not only give users a better understanding of the evolution of features to provide better feedback, but it can also help users understand why certain choices were made at different times during implementation and so on.
• Completely hide or re-enable comments when posts are updated so that users can provide feedback.
• Make sure claims are verified and omitted if not. E.g. Considering the disclaimer for preview and experimental features, claims of compatibility is better omitted unless they are verified.

[JorisdG]

Apologies for the blog confusion. We've been trying to get the team to fix this but so far no dice. There was in fact no attempt to update the existing post from two years ago, we never do that. It appears that the new blog post having the same title as the old one caused the URLs to be the same, and everything else you can see now is a consequence of this portal not accounting for a potential issue like that.

As for the compatibility, the statement is not incorrect - the point was to ensure the renaming and splitting of concepts does not require re-creating properties into the specific new types. But your point is valid that new limitations were introduced to avoid problems, and we did not communicate those clearly. That said, one limitation was a bug that we fixed (not able to use enums in functions) and the other is a limitation we had not considered (calling functions from functions) and that limitation has been removed and is rolling out through the regular update train. Accessing variables and other state from functions was removed due to inconsistent and confusing limitations with data flow. We're actively working on getting data flow to work properly (as this has been largely fixed for the introduction of user defined functions) and I'm hoping we can share some news on that soon as far as timeline, which shouldn't be too long. Once these improvements are all out, we will set a timeline for moving this out of experimental as quickly as possible so we can give you assurances of full compatibility.

[hjaf]

Thanks for your insightful response!

I hope that my feedback can be of use and maybe give the team more reason to fix these issues 🙂 

Maybe its an incorrect definition of "incompatibility", but I read "without any rework required" as the changes being compatible with components created in previous studio versions. I spent some time trying to find a good way to work around the issue, even after the enum issue was resolved. I got it working eventually, but it got a bit too convoluted and high maintenance so I ended up with a cleaner more stable method without any of the experimental/preview features enabled which makes it more production ready as well 🙂