What this book covers

Chapter 1, An Intro to ALM, provides a general, unrelated to the Power Platform, overview of what the Application Lifecycle is.

Chapter 2, ALM in Power Platform, relates the general ALM approach to the Power Platform. This chapter also covers the usual problems one experiences when trying to implement a proper ALM process for the Power Platform.

Chapter 3, Power Platform Environments, will explain in detail what is meant when talking about Environments when it comes to the Power Platform. We will discuss different environment setups.

Chapter 4, Dataverse Solutions, deepens your knowledge about solutions in Power Platform. We learn what they are for, and not for, as well as different approaches to structure them.

Chapter 5, Power Platform CLI, explains everything one needs to know about the Power Platform CLI when it comes to ALM. We will mostly focus on the commands around Solutions.

Chapter 6, Environment Variables, Connection References, and Data, dives into areas to make implementation more dynamic and how to deploy those components securely and predictably to downstream environments.

Chapter 7, Approaches to Managing Changes in Power Platform ALM, explains the difference between environment-centric and source code-centric approach. We also will learn about branching, and which pipelines a source code-centric approach requires.

Chapter 8, Essential ALM Tooling for Power Platform, dives into the different tools we have at hand to implement an ALM process for the Power Platform and how to select the correct one for your project.

Chapter 9, Project Setup, goes through everything that needs to be set up to implement the previously discussed approaches. This includes creating Service Principal Names (SPN), setting up Azure DevOps, setting up GitHub, and setting up Power Platform Pipelines. It also briefly explains how project folders could be structured.

Chapter 10, Pipelines, is the chapter where the magic happens, and we learn how to implement the source code-centric approach.

Chapter 11, Advanced Techniques, the very basic implementation we do in Chapter 10 usually requires some extension to fit a real-life scenario. This chapter will explain some of them. We will learn about advanced YAML (variables, parameters, conditions, and loops), settings files, healthy code state, and transporting data.

Chapter 12, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery, looks at which areas you need to focus on to implement a proper CI/CD process for the Power Platform. We will learn more about branching, quality gates, Pull requests, and Versioning.

Chapter 13, Deepening ALM Knowledge, is the last chapter of this book and focuses on which areas you could dive more into after finishing this book.