Azure Logic Apps Monthly Update - February 2016

The Azure logic apps team conducted their eighth monthly Google Hangout session on February 25, 2016. The session kicked off with the latest improvements that have happened over the last month.

Designer Improvements

The Logic Apps team rolled out a refreshed version of the Azure Logic Apps Preview with improvements to the designer. The improved designer comes with a lot of new capabilities such as:

Cleaner and simpler user interface
Improved Visual Flow (top to bottom flow with decision tree branches showing up on the side)
Managed Connectors
Manual Triggers and Responses – easily construct your logic app as a request+response capability. You no longer need to use the HTTP Listener connector anymore to achieve the request-response mechanism.
Get a first-class experience with the HTTP + Swagger connector within the designer
If-else conditions within the designer itself. No need to open up the code view to look into the conditions box.

Managed APIs

This is one of the major improvements. In the earlier version, when you wanted to add a connection to a service (such as OneDrive), Logic Apps would deploy a connector in your subscription as an API app. This made the Logic Apps deployment more complex. Now, there are a set of reliable and scalable API connections that are already deployed that can be easily included in the Logic App. This article provides the complete list of APIs that are currently supported out-of-the-box.

What’s Coming Next?

1. Run Now with Recurrence triggers
  - The current designer preview refresh only supports Run Now for manual triggers. This capability will be extended for recurrence triggers as well in the coming weeks.
2. Designer support for parallel actions
3. Designer Improvements
  - Support for parallel actions
  - Auto-discovery of custom APIs
  - Auto-discovery of workflows
4. Flow Monitoring
  - Gives a nice view of looking at the workflow history with the designer
5. Enabling Salesforce Sandbox
6. Improved trigger user experience

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.

You can watch the full video here to get a feel for the new designer and lots more functionalities that are now available in the preview.