A very first look at Logic Apps Preview Refresh
Finally! Well, that’s what it feels like in this day and age anyway. We can’t even wait until the next phone gets released, before we even got the last one. But Microsoft refreshed their Logic Apps Preview and took it to the next level. The next level, but for sure not the final level. Just a short post to see what’s new here. I will be playing with it a little more the upcoming days and update my findings here on my blog.
The Designer
As asthetic as people are, the first thing we will notice is an update to the designer. The biggest win for me: having it vertically now instead of horizontally. I have ranted on the fact that Mule has a horizontal designer and my mouse doesn’t have a horizontal scroll wheel. It also takes up a lot of space and with vertical designers you can easily collapse things. It’s just more natural, it makes more sense. Yes, I enjoy the little things in life 🙂
Conditions / decisions
A not so little thing is being able to put conditions in your flows. Loops are still missing, as are a lot of other features we are very used to as BizTalk professionals. Also features that were there in the “old” designer – or I may be missing things here. As I’ve understood the team is fully comitted to get more features (for-each, splitting, rules etc.) to the new Logic Apps designer in upcoming iterations. And since Build is coming up I guess the releases will follow pretty quickly. Can’t wait 🙂
Deployment
Something as crucial as deployment was not the best experience when it comes to Logic Apps. A deployment script could keep you busy for at least 350 lines of code and it wasn’t the easiest task on hand. Well, the team has been working hard to work to improve this for us. You can read more about it over here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/logicapps/archive/2016/02/23/deploying-in-the-logic-apps-preview-refresh.aspx
Bugs I’ve encountered
Yes, there are still some quirks here and there, but the team will probably keep on scrumming to make the product more complete and get rid of all the bugs. I’ve played with it for a really short time, so I guess I will encounter some more the upcoming days.
When you enter “advanced mode, there is no way back
If you click a shape to enter advanced mode, there’s no way to get back to normal (drag and drop development ;)) mode.
When I enter code view, I can’t return to the designer
I had an unconfigured shape, went into the Code view and was unable to return to the Designer. After discarding the changes, you can return to your Designer.
