We're almost at the finish line! Our Powerful Devs Hack Together is coming to a close and we encourage you to continue with your AI journey.The learning doesn't have to be over! You can still submit a project up until February 28th, 11:59 PM PT! You can also continue building your skills with our Powerful Devs Cloud Skills Challenge!Thank you to our speakers from both the Powerful Devs conference and Hack Together live streams for show casing how to build AI-powered solutions with Power Platform, Azure and Microsoft 365. You learned, you hacked, you innovated. You are all now official Power Platform AI hackers!What happened in the last 2 weeks of the Power Platform?Powerful Devs Conference 2025!On February 12th, we kicked off the Powerful Devs Conference 2025! The event featured a variety of sessions, including exploring AI features in Copilot Studio, mastering ALM strategies, and building cross-platform apps with .NET MAUI. If you missed it, you can catch up on all the sessions on our YouTube Playlist. If you have feedback, please submit our Conference Survey!Week 1: February 17-21stPowerful Devs Hack Kickoff: All About AIApril Dunnam, Gomolemo Mohapi and Scott Durow set the vibes for Powerful Devs Hack Together in this session.April covered the logistics and rules of the hack together, followed by Gomolemo walking us through building AI prompts with AI Builder for a user scenario where it will review incoming emails related to employee expenses and assess the expense receipts to identify the expense categories that are managed in Dataverse. The walkthrough included the new AI prompt feature of image/document input that leverages the GPT-4o model, and how to embed the AI Prompt in a Power Automate cloud flow to create a new expense and upload the associated receipt in the relevant table in Dataverse. We then had Scott focus on development for enterprise grade solutions. Scott shared best practices for scalability and security when designing and building your solutions. Even though we are in the era of AI, it's still critical to have security enforced in your solutions. To better understand best practices with Power Platform and Azure, Scott covered the Contoso Real Estate sample which is available for anyone to install in a non-production environment to inspect and learn what an enterprise solution may look like underneath the hood.The Developer's Approach to Power AutomateDenisse Luna and Joy Kirkwood cover Power Automate cloud flows in this session, where they share how to design your automated processes to be successful in the long run using code-first developer techniques and applying traditional coding standards to optimize your cloud flows performance and scalability.Some of the best practices they share arecreating a single Connection Reference per data source in a solution to ensure all actions across your cloud flows use consistent credentials in all environments.consider using the built-in odata query operators in actions, for example using the Dataverse List rows action results in an array returned in the response of the action. Explore limiting the columns returned, add a filter to reduce the rows returned in the array, use the expand operator to bring data from related tables - all of these additions will help the performance of your automation.implement a try-catch mechanism using the Scope action where a "Try" scope contains the actions of the process that's automated, and the "Catch" scope is executed when the "Try" scope fails. The "Catch" scope checks for failures in the "Try" scope, and some form of communication that includes details of the failures is sent to a team for further diagnosis.Week 2: February 24-28th | Powerful Devs Hack Kickoff: All About AISecuring Microsoft Copilot Studio Integration with External ConnectorsRabia Williams and Paolo Pialorsi in this session showcase how to use connectors for your agents built with Microsoft Copilot Studio, as well as how to build a custom connector to interact with external services to enhance your agents responses.Rabia first does a walkthrough of a Human Resource (HR) agent built in Microsoft Copilot Studio that is accessed by Microsoft 365 Copilot. The HR agent helps the HR recruitment team to search an Excel file which contains a list of candidates to show how connectors work with agents.Paolo then explains how to create a custom connector where he briefly explains all the different options available to start from when defining the REST API for your custom connector and shows us the option of creating one by importing an OpenAPI file which processes the content of the file, resulting in the actions being listed in the definition of the custom connector.The sessions continues by breaking down the following,how to consume the Microsoft Graph endpoint through a custom connector, securely authenticate the connector using OAuth 2.0 and Microsoft Entra ID, and add the connector to your agent.how to enable Service Principal support instead of user-based connection and the reasons to why you would choose this option.how to consume a third party or custom APIs such as Azure Functions, ASP.NET Web Applications etc, and how to establish the authentication by using OAuth 2.0 and Microsoft Entra ID once again.Powerful Devs Hack Overview: Building Powerful SolutionsDaniel Laskewitz invited Elliot Fraser, winner of Power Platform Global AI Hack 2023, where Elliot talks about his solution that won the Grand Prize winner category and shares tips for Powerful Devs Hack Together.Elliot developed a Power Platform solution, known as the Teaching Accelerator, to expedite the process for teachers in creating a curriculum for their students. The solution utilizes OpenAI’s ChatGPT service where teachers can interact with it through a Copilot embedded in the model-driven app to create lessons, modify the lessons created, and create an entire curriculum of lessons for a topic. Elliot’s Teaching Accelerator solution won the Grand Prize winner category of the hackathon due to the impact it would have in the education space by reducing the hours teachers spend annually. Winning and participating in the hackathon led to a new job opportunity for Elliot, he's now a Technical Lead in the education industry.We then next had April, Gomolemo and Daniel close the session with the following,April explained how to submit your project by selecting the correct category and what we're looking for in your AI powered solutions. April also shared suggestions on some of the Power Platform AI features that can be incorporated into your solutions. Gomolemo provided guidance on how to use AI Builder effectively such as including responsible AI practices when using AI prompts and practicing prompt engineering to develop effective AI prompts.Scott and Daniel do a recap on security best practices for your solutions and what to be mindful of to build a solution is scalable.April closes by outlining the next steps which is toSubmit your project at aka.ms/PowerfulDevs/Hack before February 28th 11:59 PM PT to win prizes.Catch-up on the livestreams at aka.ms/PowerfulDevs/OnDemand as seen above.Provide feedback by filling in our survey form at aka.ms/powerfuldevs/hack/survey so we know what you thought of for this year's Powerful Devs Hack Together.Thank You!A big heartfelt thank you to all of the individual and teams who participated in this year's Powerful Devs Hack Together 😊We can't wait to review your projects submitted on GitHub and see what amazing solutions have been built with Power Platform, Azure and Microsoft 365.We’d also like to thank all of our judges for their expertise and dedication to the community!