New Udemy Course: 10 Tips for Building Effective Flows

**Discount Code Available at end of Post**

Back in early August, I created my first Udemy course called Microsoft Flow vs Azure Logic Apps, which tool is right for me? So far the course has been well-received and I appreciate all of you who have taken the course and provided feedback. I enjoyed the process so much that I decided to build another course. This time, I teamed up with Jon Levesque to bring you 10 Tips for Building Effective Flows.
Jon and I have co-presented at several events in the past including Ignite, Business Application Summit, Ready and Microsoft Build in addition to recording several YouTube videos like Hot Dog/Not Hot Dog, Automating Your Customer Service and Dude Where’s My Car to name a few. Jon was recently visiting Calgary so we took an opportunity to record some segments for the course.
The outcome is we have a course that helps beginners learn some essential tips that will make them more productive, their flows will become more maintainable and more reliable. The tips that we are including are:

1. Copy to my Clipboard
2. Scopes
3. Configure Run After
4. Test Flows
5. Flow Checker
6. Name and Rename
7. Sharing with Security Groups
8. Send a Copy
9. Comments
10. Switch Statements

Within each lecture we will show you how you can uses these tips, but more importantly we will share WHY you should be using them.
For those of you who may be further along on your flow journey, this course may not be for you. But, stay tuned! We are actively working on an Advanced Tips course which should be a better fit.
To show our appreciation for checking out this blogpost, we have a 30% discount code for you that will get you this course for $13.99 USD

Speaking at the Power Platform World Tour (Calgary)

Now that the agenda has been posted, I wanted to share that I will be speaking at the upcoming Power Platform World Tour, in Calgary on October 3rd and 4th. My session is called Intelligent Automation using Microsoft Flow. This is a topic that I am deeply passionate about as I feel it has the ability to transform organizations. This transformation occurs, by scaling efforts through the use of intelligent processes….processes that we can automate using flow and Artificial Intelligence!!!

I started talking about this topic back when I was at Microsoft including a session at Ignite 2018. The difference between that time and now is Microsoft has introduced a new intelligent capability called AI Builder. AI Builder is a service that brings Artificial Intelligence to ‘citizen developers’ without the need to have a deep background in the subject.

My session is scheduled for Thursday, October 3rd at 1:30 PM and in this session I will demonstrate how we can use Microsoft Flow to intelligently parse forms, automatically derive insights and perform object recognition without the need to wire up external services.

I hope to see you there!!!

Serverless Tips - Exception Handling and Scopes

In late 2018 I started contributing to the #ServerlessTips on https://www.serverlessnotes.com, a community knowledge base hosted by Serverless360. I have written more than 30 tips, mostly on Azure Logic Apps, on that site and I wanted to highlight some of my favorites. Now, I won’t go ahead and cross-post these entire topics, but I wanted to elevate their visibility as I think they are important.

Exception Handling - Configure Run After Settings

In a world of connected services running across data centers and public clouds world-wide, errors are bound to happen. These errors can be related to underlying technical infrastructure issues or related to missing or unexpected data.

Regardless of the reasons, Logic Apps developers need to plan and react when these exception events occur.

Java and .NET developers are very comfortable using try-catch-finally semantics when it comes to error handling. However, in Azure Logic Apps, developers use a different approach, to achieve similar behaviors. Read More

Scopes

Configure Run After Settings allow you to decide what a subsequent action should do in the event of a previous action succeeding or failing. But, what happens when you have a more complex logic app and you have logically related actions that must succeed or fail as a group? Within Azure Logic Apps, we don’t have the luxury of using distributed transaction coordinators, but we do have other capabilities that manage this type of scenario. Read More

Udemy Course: Microsoft Flow vs Azure Logic Apps...which tool should I use?

Introducing my new course on Udemy on Microsoft Flow and Azure Logic Apps, two of my favorite cloud services.
**Discount Code available at end of blog**

Why did I write this course?

I wrote this course out of frustration! You can’t go to a Microsoft conference these days when the question of which tool should I use doesn’t come up. I have no problem with people asking the question, but I grew tired of the same watered-down answers coming from the respective Product Groups about why their tool is better. Now, I have friends on both the Flow and Logic Apps teams, so I can’t blame them. After all, if you work for Coke, are you going to recommend Pepsi? Not likely.
I thought with my experience as a Program Manager on the Flow team and having been an Azure Integration MVP (and BizTalk MVP before that), I was in a good position to build a course on this subject that provides objective guidance on each tool’s strengths and opportunities that come with that tool.

What will I learn in this course?
This course contains over 5.5 hours of content. I never intended it to be this long but I wanted to get deep into details and really demonstrate some of the unique capabilities of each tool. More specifically, the agenda looks like this:

• Course Introduction
• Microsoft Flow Features
  • PowerApps and CDS Integration
  • Flow Maker Portal (Templates, Connectors)
  • Microsoft Flow Approvals
  • Microsoft Flow Maker Analytics
  • Microsoft Flow Buttons
  • Sharing
  • Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
  • Admin and Governance
• Azure Logic Apps Features
  • Azure Portal (Templates, Connectors)
  • Editing Experiences
  • Enterprise Integration Pack
  • Inline Code
  • Integration Service Environment
  • Azure Integration Services
  • API Management
  • Azure Monitoring
  • Governance
• Organizational Fit and how does the design of your organization impacts which tool(s) you use
• Microsoft Flow Solution Demos (2 deep dives)
• Azure Logic Apps Solution Demos (2 deep dives)
• Declaring the Winner
• Course Wrap-up and Additional resources

One area that I feel is really important in this course is the Governance models that exist for each tool. This becomes a very important consideration when levering one tool over another, in part due to the significant differences in approaches.
I spent a lot of time in demos providing you with deep exposure to the features. I will also compare and contrast the different approaches used by each team as they try to solve that specific problem.
So whether your are in the Microsoft Flow camp or the Azure Logic Apps camp, I am confident that you will learn something new.
In appreciation of checking out my blog, I have a special code for the first 15 5 people to buy my course at a discounted price of $19.99 by using this link.
Thanks for checking this out and if you have taken the course, I would love to hear from you.
Thanks,
Kent