Link Mobility and Sopranova Unite!

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When you think of Quidditch, you probably picture soaring broomsticks, intense chases for the Golden Snitch, and a whole lot of wizardly fun. What you don’t picture is the part where players pull out their smartphones to log into an app—because even magical athletes need tech that works!

The sponsor badges added another dimension to this year’s hackathon, and why not dive right in directly and incorporate one of them to our solution! The various services offered by Link Mobility gave us several ideas and we immediately decided to create a proof of concept for one of the elements in our solution.

Given our solution, users are engaging with the app by creating their own teams, choosing quidditch players as well as other personalized features. In order to extend the personalized experience and uniqueness, we also wanted to test the possibility of adding a login page. The concept was quite simple, we wanted to utilize the Link Mobility SMS gateway in order to generate unique OTP codes. The uniqueness of the codes would we validated by using a Power Automate flow while also managing the values in our Dataverse database.

There are several features that we potentially will add as well using the SMS service by Link Mobility. However, as a start we created the simple proof of concept which is illustrated in the short video below:

Books And Cleverness – There Are More Important Things; Friendship And Bravery

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Famous words spoken by Hermione Granger after they defeated the troll.

We have really felt the impact of this during this hackathon. When venturing into new territory and using tools and setting up applications that are new and unfamiliar, we often rely on documentation to get started. More often than not, at some point the documentation fails us and we are blocked from getting further. That’s when you need friends to help unblock you.

Like when Philip helped Emil to install the correct version of .NET on his new computer to enable him to finish setting up the tooling needed to build his first PCF component.

Ulrikke got help from Andy Wingate when she got stuck setting up Business Central as a virtual table in Dataverse. Andy jumped on a Teams call in the early morning hours to help unblock her.

Stig got help from unexpected sources when he got stuck setting up a trial for Fabric in our demo environmnent. Fredrik Engseth from another team – BUT the same Hufflepuff HOUSE as us, overheard our conversation and helped us figure our a smart hack to get Dataverse connected to a developer instance of Fabric, using a Service Principal with cross tenant permissions. Thank you Fredrik <3


Sharing really is caring, and like Hermione says,

“Books And Cleverness – There Are More Important Things; Friendship And Bravery”

Bravery to ask a friend for help

Have you heard or maybe experienced Existential Crisis?

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Our Faruk the Fabricator is living it now. Since yesterday, he was challenging himself on how to display the results in the best possible way… but he never questioned his Loooove to Fabric. And he also knows that the Fabric is the Marauder’s Map of data—you always know where everything is, even if it’s trying to hide.

Here are the results of our data in Power BI report. We can see different metrics for student data.

We can also put KPI and compare ourselves with the so called Sorting Hat.

It is our first year since Wayfinder Academy was created and we introduced our Logiquill portal and we already show same performance, wait a few more years and we will leave him in the dust, as it already wasn’t dusty enough.

Here are our components inside Fabric

Our dax code in Power BI:

Here is why we also claim Chameleon badge, in addition to Dash it Out:

Solution is responsive. Adapts to all devices and screen sizes.

Data Enrichment Capabilities in OwlExpress

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OwlExpress is delighted to partner with two excellent Muggle based services, to provide additional value to our solution:

  • Royal Mail Postcode Address File (PAF): Muggles are particularly ingenious with their homes, having all manner of different addresses, which can make it challenging to dispatch an Owl to the correct location. The benefits of using the PAF file* is that our solution can always validate and check that we have the correct address – including details such as house name, street, postcode, town / city and more. Our solution can frequently validate against PAF, to ensure your Owl never misses a delivery and can cope with the latest crazy concoctions that Muggles put in place for their homes.
  • MSN Weather Connector: Muggles claim to be able to accurately predict the weather, and their claim in this area cannot be disputed. A potentially bad weather event could cause severe difficulties for your Owl deliveries, including potential harm or loss of life. Our solution can proactively check against current weather forecasts and, if there is a high risk of potential bad weather, ensure that the Owl delivery is postponed to a later date. What’s more, we can bring in Artificial Intelligence capabilities to automate the evaluation and decision process here, using a clean and effective system prompt.

Rest assured, House Elves Limited follows stringent Obliviate processes when dealing with Muggle personnel from these companies, so you can be assured that we are fully compliant with the International Statute of Secrecy

*Data sample used for this exercise, strictly for testing and evaluation purposes.

Badge Category

  • Dataminer

Helping a Team in need

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Helping a team with a workaround for activating Microsoft Free Trial Capacity when not working in CDX trial environment 😰

Helping with creating a multitenant service principle using client id and client secret, and use of Dynamics 365 CRM access in Azure. And using another tenant for Fabric Free Trial capacity and use Dynamics 365 connector in Fabric to retrieve data from the CDX tenant.

Claiming the badge Sharing is Caring 🤓

Nasty Hacker

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Badge: Nasty hacker

In the world of coding, much like in the realm of wizards, secrets must be safeguarded from prying eyes. Wizards have their wands; developers have their credentials, keys, and secrets. But during a hackathon, with the clock ticking, practicality often trumps perfection.

Normally, when building a PowerApps Component Framework (PCF) component, best practices dictate making it reusable and configurable. This means parameters like API keys or environment-specific data should be dynamically passed during configuration. But who has time for that in a hackathon?

For the sake of speed and simplicity, we decided to skip flexibility. Instead of allowing users to input Dynamics parameters when configuring the PCF, we hardcoded them directly into the component. Yes, it’s messy, and yes, it’s a cardinal sin in standard development. But it works, and it gets us closer to claiming our badge of “superdirty hacks to achieve awesomeness.

It’s not elegant. It’s not reusable. But it’s efficient—and in a hackathon, that’s the magic we need.

When AI Meets Magic

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The iconic Sorting Hat of Hogwarts has been a symbol of magical tradition for centuries. Its ancient magic is known to sort students into the four houses based on their traits, desires, and potential. But what if the Sorting Hat evolved beyond the limitations of old-world wizardry and embraced the cutting-edge technology of the modern age? So here comes our hat —an innovative blend of magic and artificial intelligence. How it works? You can see how we hacked it in our blog post The Rise of the Nasty Hacker | Arctic Cloud Developer Challenge Submissions

However, there’s always been a certain mystery and subjectivity in this process. How does the Hat truly decide? Is it based purely on traits or does it take into account factors like personal growth, past experiences, or future potential? Instead of just reading surface-level thoughts, the hacked Sorting Hat now uses AI to perform sentiment analysis.
The AI isn’t static. It learns over time. Each year, the Sorting Hat gathers data from previous students, analyzing patterns and trends in the way students behave, grow, and thrive in their respective houses. This means that with each passing year, the AI can make more informed decisions, recognizing which traits lead to success in each house.

The AI in the hat engages the student in a brief, intuitive dialogue—asking thought-provoking questions or presenting scenarios that help it analyze how a student might approach challenges.

Not only does the hat talk but it moves it face and mouth as well! You wanna try it? Don’t hesitate to come to Dumbledore’s Developers and check it out!

Bonus to ALM Magic, Digital Transformation and Low Code!

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Kudos to one of our judges @benedikt bergmann for all the work shared at GitHub. We strongly recommend all fellow magic makers here to check it out GitHub – BenediktBergmann/PCFIntro Will it be too much to say, we really want to win a book about Application Lifecycle Management on Microsoft Power Platform?

We also released the PowerPlatform custom connector. That is available in our GitHub repo. The repository also includes GitHub pipeline implementation to release the fresh version of the connector. 

So, you can now use the connector to process the emotional recognition reports by uploading the prepared dataset to SharePoint and notifying the Admin that the artifact is available.

The repo structure is simple enough. 

The repo also contains the release pipelines based on the GitHub actions. 

How to build a new release? 

Follow these steps to manually create a new release on GitHub: 

  1. Create a New Tag: Use the naming convention v.x.x.x.x, where x is a digit. For example: v.1.0.0.0 
  1. Generate Artifacts: Ensure that the artifact name is automatically derived from package/Other/Solution.xml using the UniqueName attribute. 
  1. Update Documentation: Make sure all relevant documentation is up-to-date with the new release details. 
  1. Publish the Release: On GitHub, draft a new release, add the appropriate tag, and upload the managed and unmanaged solution files. 

Artifacts 

Artifacts generated during the release process include two types of solutions: 

  • Managed: This contains the finalized version of the connector, which is ready for deployment. It ensures that all customizations are locked and can be used in production environments. 
  • Unmanaged: This includes the editable version of the connector for further development and customization. It is ideal for testing and development environments. 

The secret key to productivity: Low Code Magic Powers our solution

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In the world of Microsoft tech, much like Hogwarts, the real magic happens when all the pieces work together…

We take all of the feedbacks from our honorable judges as a gift (THANK YOU!!! and we hope you like the morning sweets, those are healthy snacks from Spain brought by Yurii the Wise, and we do accept orders and offer free delivery). Pls don’t take this wrong, we are just trying our best!

Thanks for your yesterday recognition

Since yesterday evening, we could not stop thinking about low code.

So, today we aim to do the series of updates sharing our efforts in the Low code category. We know we might not be the best in there, but we are exploring, listening around and learning as we speak. Would Low code dance or something will help to improve our image in the low code field?

Getting down to business, we are using the Power automate in our solution. The process we automate is the creation of the activities required for each student in order to be allocated to a faculty. We have a template of the activities. After the student starts the assessment process – the guidance is available for them.


In order to pass the survey, we are using the survey responses table, the drafts are prepared in advance using the Power Automate:

We will share more in the coming posts. Please excuse us for the long start of this one, it was a clumsy attempt to make it feel like a morning read after a late night yesterday. We had a lot of fun and still having it!

The Rise of the Nasty Hacker

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In the world of technology, there are many paths to greatness, but sometimes, the route isn’t as straightforward as following the rules. Enter the Nasty Hacker: a rebellious tech wizard, crafting super dirty hacks to achieve what others might deem impossible!
These aren’t your typical, squeaky-clean tricks—these are the hacks that bend the system, challenge the norm, and most importantly, achieve pure awesomeness.

In this case, our Nasty Hacker decided to hack… Sorting Hat! He is the wizard who crafts super dirty hacks to manipulate the sorting process and create their own path to greatness. He is the one deciding about your destiny! With a deep knowledge of ancient enchantments, magic, and coding, he aims to rewrite your future with a few clever tricks! But he is busted now! Hands up, Simon!

Let me reveal the secret how he did it. He hacked the Sorting Hat using speech-to-text (Whisper), AI-based language processing (Azure OpenAI), and text-to-speech synthesis (Eleven Labs) to create a more interactive and personalized sorting experience.

But you will forgive him because this is all for creating the most awesome Sorting Hat that you will fall in love with!