By Simon Bisson – Microsoft’s Power Platform has become a significant part of its developer offering during the past few years. Perhaps best thought of as the modern equivalent of the 1990s client-server applications and tools like the original Visual Basic, the Power Platform is a family of rapid application development tools intended for a mixed audience of both developers and business analysts.

Power Platform is built on the Common Data Model at the heart of the Dynamics line-of-business systems and on the workflow automation of Azure’s Logic Apps. It offers a mix of tools for building internal enterprise applications that deliver information to user desktops and devices. There are three key developer-facing tools in the Power Platform: Flow, Power Apps, and Power BI. Each supports different audiences, but they also fit together to give you a business information processing pipeline, from core systems at one end, to desktop dashboards and mobile applications at the other. Read more: