Azure Logic Apps Live - December 2018

After the previous Logic Apps live webcast back in September 2018, the team were back just in time for their webcast on December 13, 2018 – the Christmas edition! This month’s webcast was spearheaded by Kevin Lam and Jon Fancey from the Azure Logic Apps team. The updates from this edition of Logic Apps live are as follows.

What’s New in Azure Logic Apps?

Integration Service Environment private preview – The private preview is launched for Integration Service Environment and you can register for the access here.
HTML control – You can send a message over email with rich texts like bold, underlines, italics now you get that control right in the designer. You can actually see the format right in the designer vertical when you send that message.
XSLT output decoration – This option enables you to text in any format such as XML, so that you could actually get the flat text out of excel.
Resubmission Tracking– You can now resubmit with source trigger history name when you resubmit logic app previous runs. This enables you to see that it was resubmitted along with the original run ID of that logic app. You can get the data right from the run and determine if this was a rerun of a previously run logic app.
Content links for maps (both for XLT and Liquid) – Now you can push your maps to storage and link from actions to run the maps, making the deployment management easier. The ability to point the file itself instead of using the current mechanism.
More EDI Improvements – Both X12 and EDIFACT have the ability to use multiple transactions set when encoding to support interchange capabilities and sophisticated scenarios.
Improvement to VS Code – You can get to IntelliSense and be able to write in the code view right in JSON in VS Code. Now you get that visualization in VS Code designer. Editing in the designer is not yet possible.
The Azure scheduler will be deprecated in September 2019, the team has created some collateral for Logic Apps to help with this transition. This allows you to create a million different scheduled logic apps. Instead of mapping a scheduler job to a logic app resource you can now create a pair of logic apps that are smart enough to handle all those different re-occurrence schedules. Paired with that there is a new design template that helps you manage multiple instances with correlations. So even if you are not doing scheduler, there are some interesting patterns and advanced capabilities in the QuickStart, as well as the designer templates.

New Connectors

Credits to a lot of third-parties who write their own connectors and submit it to Logic Apps. 14 new connectors were added between last Logic Apps webcast and now. The most interesting one is the Ethereum Blockchain – Ethereum is a smart contract blockchain. With the Ethereum Blockchain connector, you can perform actions such as submitting transactions, reading contract state, and trigger flows on contract updates.

What’s in Progress?

Aesthetic Outputs – Formerly known as Mock output. With this, you will be able to launch a logic app in action and fake the output for that action. Instead of executing that action it will just return the output. This gives you the ability to test a certain path in your logic apps that could affect the back-end system.
Delete a run – In scenarios where you might want to remove an existing run. This option will help you to delete a run from your store.
Handling many parameters – The team will work to create an experience that will enable you to choose the parameters that you wish to see instead of listing all the available parameter from the connectors. This will avoid unnecessary scrolling and searching for the parameters that you care about.
Tracking Batch Triggers
VS code Integration Support
HTTP connector to GA
Additional b2b formats like X12 and EDIFACT
New Azure Government regions – Arizona and Virginia

Upcoming Connectors

IBM Connectors – IBM screen tracking connectivity for green screens for 30-70 seconds
IOT Hub connector – The development is complete but not released yet. Will be released in the new year
Azure Key Vault connector – 99% development activities are complete and will be released in the new year
Amazon SQS – In development state
Amazon S3 – In development state
Amazon SMS – In development state

Community Events Logic Apps team are a part of

Global Integration Bootcamp – March 30, 2019 (Saturday)
Microsoft Ignite – The Tour – Singapore, Sydney, Hong Kong, Seoul London, Amsterdam and Mumbai
INTEGRATE 2019 – A partner event run by Kovai Ltd (BizTalk360). This year the event happens in London between June 3-5, 2019 and at Convention center, Redmond between June 24-26, 2019. It is a 3-day event with speakers from Microsoft Product team and Azure MVPs presenting sessions on the upcoming features and interesting use cases. Registrations are open for both these events check here.

Feedback

If you are working on Logic Apps and have something interesting, feel free to share them with the Azure Logic Apps team via email or you can tweet to them at @logicappsio. You can also vote for features that you feel are important and that you’d like to see in logic apps here.

The Logic Apps team are currently running a survey to know how the product/features are useful for you as a user. The team would like to understand your experiences with the product. You can take the survey here.

If you ever wanted to get in touch with the Azure Logic Apps team, here’s how you do it!

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