As one of the major innovation in the direction of mobile development from Microsoft is Microsoft PowerApps, it makes sense to evaluate the possibilities of such a technology (Microsoft PowerApps). Of course the technology is still not 100% on the market, however the framework is based on Project Siena so evaluating that might give an inside to the PowerApp development itself.
CAN:
- Windows Apps
- What you is what you get editor
- Classical UI elements, Text, Label, ListBox, some limited grid functionality.
- Datasources, integrating data directly form SharePoint (at the moment some special Datasource for Office 365 is possible), from web search, from classical community sites, like Facebook, yammer, Instagram.
- Some possibility to locally store data, like importing from Excel.
- Advanced multimedia elements, like video or audio.
- Further developing the project with Visual Studio is possible (with some hacking).
- Sharing and Publishing Applications.
CAN NOT:
- IOS or Android Apps (Theoreticaly it will be possible with PowerApps).
- Implementing
- Implementing complex logic based on the data
- Integrating industrial data sources like SQL, different web services (It is pormised to be extended for PowerApps)
CONCLUSION:
Project Siena is at the moment pretty much in the direction of as a game, build your App, share with your friends, be happy. That is actually a nice thing however it can not be really used for industrial purposes. If the platform will really be extended in a way that it is really cross-platform (having IoS and Android), it supports easy integration of professional data sources like databases or webservices and other industrial systems than it can be used as a real enterprise system. It is still pretty much questionable how much is considered that the system can be further developed by Visual Studio. At the moment it looks rather that way that it will be an only cloud framework where get the functioanlity out of the bix without too much possibility to extend: Microsoft PowerApps Pricing. If it is a possible scenario to further developing by Enterprise Frameworks, like Xamarin than it can really be a great technology.
