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During the second day of Integrate 2017, Jeff and Kevin did a session on DevOps for Logic Apps. They explained the available tooling in Visual Studio for that purpose:

  • Hosted Logic App designer
  • Cloud Explorer
  • Resource Group Projects

Hosted Logic App designer – First of all, since some time it is possible to create your Logic Apps from within Visual Studio. This enables you to for example use Team Foundation Services or Visual Studio Services to check-in your Logic Apps code.

Cloud Explorer – Another feature in Visual Studio is the Cloud Explorer which, besides browse and search capabilities for your Logic Apps, the following features:

  • Edits done in the designer can be published to the Azure portal
  • Enable, disable and delete Logic Apps
  • Run Logics Apps and view the Run History
  • Download Logic App which is handy when started development in the portal

After download the Logic App, you can add the Logic App as an existing item to a Resource Group project, which we will discuss now.

Resource Group projects – Visual Studio comes with the Resource Group project type, which allows you to persist artefacts and configuration for your deployments. Amongst the features are:

  • Storing/using parametrization which supports Azure Vault for safely storing credentials
  • Creation of connections like you can in the Azure portal
  • The configuration of your Integration accounts to easily reference schema’s, maps etc.
  • Source control

After you have created such a project, the Azure Resource template contains the stuff and other stuff you need to be in the deployment. Think of for example:

  • Logic Apps which need to be referenced by Id
  • Parameters, for example – different environments
  • Variables which actually are constants
  • Any post deploy output values like the Request Trigger URL

A good starting point is the Azure Quickstart templates, which contains over 500 templates, including a number of templates for creating Logic Apps. An example of such a template is a Logic App which uses an Azure function. So the fun part of using these templates is that basically, your infrastructure and PaaS solutions can be code and be deployed with these templated.

You’ll find these templates here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/templates/

Related Links – Recap of Day 2 at INTEGRATE 2017

Author: Lex Hegt

Lex Hegt works in the IT sector for more than 25 years, mainly in roles as developer and administrator. He works with BizTalk since BizTalk Server 2004. Currently he is a Technical Lead at BizTalk360. View all posts by Lex Hegt