How Copilot will Transform Power Apps Development

Low-code software development is a serious trend that's reshaping our lives. Traditionally, building software took anywhere between a couple of months to a full-blown year. Much of this had to do with the complexity of the coding process and the need to test software to perfection.

However, as more and more businesses adopted software, the need to create software systems at a faster rate increased. In their quest to create software faster, professionals turned to adopting processes like agile software development and DevOps in order to meet the market demand.

But the demand only keeps growing. Technology has now exploded in evvery aspect of our lives. The remotest stretches of third-world contries now boast internet penetration. This has signficantly increased the demand for software and the need to build them faster.

Early Attempts

Apart from adopting processes like agile, software professionals sought out other enhancements to reduce development time. This naturally led to the quest for efficient coding practices. Programmers were interested in getting the job done with as little code as possible. One could even look at early software development principles like the DRY principle as an attempt to reduce unnecessary code.

But low-level coding principles could only get you so far. At the architecture level, design patterns were introduced to enable flexible and faster software development. These patterns served a variety of causes like obscuring complexity, simplifying sharing, and enabling decoupling of the software systems. Put together the goal of these practices was to enable secure, seamless, and swift software product development.

Another major attempt at reducing code is the adoption of appliacation libraries and frameworks. Essentially these products package reusable code that developers can then use to build widely popular features.

Introducing Low-code

As the quest for faster software solutions heated up, developers wanted to write less and less code. This gave rise to the use of GUIs where components could be dragged and dropped instead of being coded. This could be viewed as the earliest forms of low-code development.

While early attempts were limited to user interface design, these platforms started adding more features like code generation, database integration, and more. And thus low-code development platforms were born. These platforms allowed programmers to generate much of the platform code through drag and drop GUIs and allowed minimal tweaking where necessary.

The Power apps platform, introduced by Microsoft, is one such popular low-code application development platform.

The Buck does'nt Stop There!

Low-code platforms already significantly speed up the process of software development. But technologies like GenAI are going taking this further by generating code in real-time.

By leveraging large language models (LLMs) trained on massive amounts of existing code and programming knowledge, Gen AI technologies can generate code for most popular use-cases. This further simplifies the task of software development and lets programmers focus on more important architectural decisions.

Copilot is Microsoft's Generative AI enabled assistant that users can use for a variety of tasks. Copilot was already integrated with the Microsoft Bing search. And now, Microsoft has decided to integrate Copilot to simplify power apps development.

With Copilot, power apps developers can now generate code by describing requirements and application features in their preferred language. The platform uses natural language processing to understand your requirements and generates code as per your needs in real time!

With the addition of this feature, businesses can now build software applications in a matter of days. Thus newer features can be shipped faster to the users. Integration with Copilot is sure to drive increased adoption of low-code development.