Logic Apps review (Usability and Extensibility) part 2

My previous post here.

https://blog.ninocrudele.com/2017/03/10/logic-apps-review-ui-and-mediation-part-1/

I keep going with my assessment with Logic Apps, I need to say that more I dig and more I like it and there are many reasons for that.
I love technology, I love it in all the aspects, one of the things that most fascinate myself is, what I like to call, the technology perception.I like to see how different people approach the same technology stack, Logic Apps is a great sample for me as BizTalk Server or Azure Event Hubs and other.
When I look to Logic Apps I see an open and fully extensible Azure stack to integrate and drive my azure processes.In these days I’m pushing the stack quite hard and I’m trying many different experiments, I have been impressed by the simplicity of the usability and the extensibility, I will speak more in detail about that in my next events but there are some relevant points of discussion.

Development comfort zone

Logic Apps offers many options, Web UI, Visual Studio, and scripting.
As I said in my previous post the Web UI is very fast and consistent but we can also use Visual Studio.
To develop using Visual Studio we just only need to install the latest Azure SDK, I’m not going to explain any detail about that as it is very to do and you can find anything you need here.
I just would like you to notice some interesting points, like the project distribution and the extensibility, first of all, to create a new Logic Apps process we need to select New Project/Cloud/Resource Group.

and we will receive a long list of templates, with the Logic Apps one as well.

I definitely like the idea of using the concept of multi templates as Azure resource group, I can create my own templates very easily and release them on GitHub for my team.
In Visual Studio we have two main options, using the designer just selecting the LogicApp.json file, right click and “Open using the Logic App designer” or directly using the JSON file.

The second by the editor which is able to offer the maximum granularity and transparency.

Deployment

About the development experience I need to say that it is very easy, just right click and Deploy

Extensibility

Logic Apps offers a lot of connectors, you don’t need to be a developer expert to create a new workflow, it is very simple to integrate an external stack and implementing a workflow able to exchange data between two systems, but my interesting has been focused on another aspect, how much simple is to extend and create my own applications blocks, triggers and actions.
I had a look at the possibility to extend the triggers and actions and I need to say that is very simple, we have two options, we can navigate in GitHub and start using one of the templates here, Jeff Hollan has created an impressive number of them and all of them are open source, I normally use these repositories to get the information I need or we can just create a new one from scratch.
Well, how much easy to create a new one from scratch, from Visual Studio we need to select New Project/Aps.Net Web Application/Azure Web API, set our Azure hosting settings

and we only need to implement our Get and GenerateAsyncResponse method able to provide the HttpResponseMessage that the Logic App flow needs to invocate for the trigger.

Continuous Integration

For the deployment, we can publish from Visual Studio or, very interesting and option for continuous integration, using GitHub, I tried both and I have been very satisfied by the simplicity of using GitHub.
To integrate GitHub we just need to create a new deployment slot in our Web API

The slot is another Web API by REST able to integrate the source control we like to use, we need to select our new slot

and select the source type we like to use, absolutely easy and fast, great job.

Telemetry

I also appreciated the possibility to use the Live Data telemetry which is very useful during the tests and the development and we have the same thing in the Azure portal.

I have so much to say about Logic Apps, you can find a lot of material and resources on an internet and please feel free to contact me for any more information.
I’m also experimenting many interesting things using Logic Apps in conjunction with BizTalk Server, I will speak a lot more in detail my next events, I definitely getting so much fun playing with it.