Today the official announcement of something cool that was in the air from a long time and that closes the gap between Azure App Service and the real world: Microsoft PowerApps.
Microsoft has announced its latest application development solution for businesses, to easily create and share apps for iOS, Android and Windows, in an easy-to-use ‘Office-like’ suite. Microsoft PowerApps has been designed for the business market, and speeds up application creation and distribution via a range of specialist tools.
Microsoft PowerApps allows businesses to integrate existing services and systems into applications, without the need for highly-skilled programmers. Multiple cloud and in-house data sources can be integrated with apps created using the service, taking advantage of dispersed company data. This can streamline data from multiple systems, into a single PowerApp solution.
As clearly explained today by Scott Hanselman:
PowerApps is the business application creation side. Think of it as a new member of the Office Family. It’s not a Visual Studio thing. Apps made with PowerApps are sharable with in your organization as easy as sharing documents and they run on Windows, Android, and iOS. A business user could build a new workflow app and share it with everyone. They can auth that new app against APIs like Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Dropbox, Twitter, Google Drive, and OneDrive. For example, my example app takes photos of the bricks and puts the result in Azure Storage, but I could just as easily drop them in Google Drive or OneDrive.
However, for Visual Studio developers, or any developer, you still use the language of your choice (C#, F#, node.js, PHP, etc) and write Web APIs and Apps and host them in Azure App Service as you always have. But, if you want, those APIs can live in a new gallery that is specific to your organization so that anyone in your org (developer or business user alike) can use in their applications.
I think that you can easily imagine the power and the opportunities. So cool!
Stefano Demiliani 