INTEGRATE2018–Logic Apps

Kevin Lam delivered an introduction to Logic apps. This session was a walkthrough of what Logic Apps is and the features and functionalities it has today. A 200 level session. Comprehensive but non-detailed. A few demos based on how easy it is for you to integrate Logic Apps with other services by Derek Li. Sessions later in the conference will go more into depth on selected parts of the different features.

Are you just getting started with Logic Apps. There is great MSDN content out there. Here is a starting point. And of course alot of community blog content as well.

This session showcased improvements in the Event Grid trigger to be able to filter on certain events in the trigger itself without having to receive the message and filter with a condition inside the workflow. It also showcased the important, and extremely easy way to use additional services, like Functions or Cognitive services.

In another session on Logic Apps later in the day the team also talked about “Enterprise Integration with Logic Apps” in which they mentioned the new features of the enterprise connectors. With some SOAP connector news well as SAP adapter improvements. With SOAP you can now create first-class SOAP connectors by importing wsdl (also see custom connectors). You can also create passthrough SOAP services and use the on-premise data gateway to access services behind the firewall.

For the SAP connector, it registers itself (the gateway) with SAP to receive an event / a message instead of polling.

There they also talked about some of the news in mapping. Like XLST 2.0/3.0 maps. XLST 3.0 maps allows you to do things such as doing a JSON > XML > JSON mapping. It also has a load of more built in functions and other things such as performance improvements, dynamic evaluation etc.

They also talked a bit about what’s new in monitoring.

One of the more interesting parts of the introduction/overview session was of course the “What’s coming?” section:

• China cloud
• Smart(er) designer, make the development process faster
• Dedicated and connected – ISE, vnets, dedicated stamp
• Testability – Being able to supply input to triggers, mocking etc.
• On-prem – Azure Stack
• Managed Service Identity – now with MSE your Logic App can be given an identity to avoid using private identities.
• Oauth request triggers – expand the triggers from SAS token to make it possible to also do OAuth
• Output property obfuscating – Add the ability to mark property as not being exposed and be encrypted
• Expanded Key Vault support – using Key Vault to pass parameters to connectors. Today it’s possible to use it as you deploy.

Later they also talked about what’s new in Enterprise Integration specifically.

Do you want to know more about what is coming? You know the team has their planning board online? It’s here.

Don’t miss the monthly updates directly from the team here.

Also catch up using the team blog.

Also, if you are missing something, make your voice hear using the uservoice here.

Got a question: The msdn forum is here.

Johan Hedberg comments: This session is of course a s must have. Of the 400 or so in attendance about 50% raised their hands when asked “who has used Logic Apps?”. More than I expected if that means “in production” but less than expected if it means “have ever tried it out”. Great to see the innovation of new features continuing. And again, features to enable you to reduce your usage of the platform and the instances started unless you actually want it to are great. Even though some things, like SOAP support for the on-premise gateway has been added, I still want to see more hybrid capabilities and more feature in the on-premise data gateway.