Microsoft recently announced the preview of support of .NET Framework assemblies in XSLT maps in Logic Apps (Standard), adding more extensibility options.
Azure Logic Apps is a managed integration service labeled as an integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS). The standard plan, released in general availability last year, is the single-tenant offering allowing customers to run workflows anywhere.
The XSLT and .NET Framework Maps support can address a couple of core scenarios, including Azure Logic Apps Integration Service Environment (ISE) and BizTalk migrations, according to the company. These migrations are very likely since ISE will retire in August 2024, and companies that are moving assets to the cloud will need a platform in the cloud for their integrations. The company’s focus with this capability is to aid customers in moving both BizTalk Server and Azure Logic (Consumption)/(ISE) workloads to Azure Logic Apps (Standard).
Standard will enable developers to upload maps and schemas to their respective folders within the artifacts folder of their project, which now also includes a new folder where they can place compiled assemblies that are called from XSLT maps.
Since Logic Apps Standard does not depend on the integration account service, the transformations can be moved quickly into the artifacts folder. Similarly, BizTalk Server users can move their transformations (XSLT) to those folders.
Kent Weare, a principal product manager at Microsoft, told InfoQ:
Our BizTalk customers have made significant investments in .NET Framework as a way to extend their BizTalk maps. Supporting .NET Framework in XSLT transformations within Logic Apps (Standard) really helps our BizTalk customers by allowing them to move their data transformations to Azure Integration Services without the need for re-wiring their maps.
In addition, Weare also said:
As part of this new capability, we have enabled a multi-language worker that allows .NET Framework assemblies to execute in a worker process that supports .NET Framework natively. This creates more opportunities for customers to execute custom code in Azure Logic Apps (Standard), and we have a series of investments planned around this new capability coming soon.
The company also invests in other capabilities for the standard plan. One of these investments is the recent public preview release of the SWIFT MT encoder and decoder, which enables customers to process SWIFT-based payment transactions with Logic Apps Standard.
Logic App Standard is available in all Microsoft Azure regions, and pricing starts from WS1 at $175.16 a month. More details on pricing are available on the pricing page and billing models on the documentation page.