What Are Microsoft Power Pages and Express Design?

pcmag.com:

We've been keeping track of low-code/no-code software development tools for several years, and Microsoft’s Power Apps has long been a leader. At Build 2022, the company announced a new Power Apps tool called Power Pages. In short, it’s a low-code business website builder. Other members of the Power Platform suite include Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. Underlying all these tools is what Microsoft calls your Dataverse.

Along with Power Pages, the company announced one of the very coolest things Microsoft showed at Build 2022: Power Platform’s Express Design tool. This lets you turn a PDF, PowerPoint, scanned paper form, screenshot of a legacy app, or even a picture of a hand-drawn interface into working code.

At the conference, product managers Priya Vaidyanathan and Sandeep Dhanrajani described the new tool as “an enterprise-grade, low-code platform for creating, hosting, and administrating rich, data-first interactive business web apps worldwide.”

You can create a site in Power You build Power Pages in a web browser, using low-code, customizable templates, or in Visual Studio for more advanced needs. The wizard-like interface starts off very basic, as you can see in the screenshot above. Then, as with most website builders, you select a template that works for your business.

The tool then creates a URL for you (you can also use a custom domain) and can create a trial Power Apps environment or you can use your existing one. In a couple minutes, after the site is spun up, you’re in the design studio, which looks just like many other site builders, where you choose pages, edit layouts, and add navigation and functionality. There’s another wizard here to take noncoders through the process. You can search