Cortana Availability

Ever notice that it can take two invocations to a Cortana skill to get it to work on Azure?

This is because resources are unloaded if they are idle for 20 minutes.  The first invocation; you need to wait for the resources (web app service) to load. You can change this in basic and standard service plans by changing the app service’s settings to “Always On”. 

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/monitor-web-app-availability

But if you are using a free tier, what do you do? Set up an availability test that pings your web server every 15 minutes via an Azure web job or Azure monitor. 

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/webjobs-create 
• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/monitor-web-app-availability

But be aware: keeping resources live can consume your credits!

Two months later...

Hello! It seems I have not posted in almost two months. Life always gets interesting. My in-laws and oldest daughter visited. Then there was the flu, head colds, and administrative issues... so my tinkering slowed down to nothing. I've barely even managed to explore my Christmas present: a Playstation Classic.

I have lots of topics I could write about, because between work and personal enlightenment, I've touched on a lot. I am more than happy to take direction on what to write about - because often times I tell myself no one reads what I write so there is no hurry in getting things down.

Cortana

I did get to push out work related samples on building against bot framework v4. It is different enough to cause people grief in upgrading, and v4 is slightly more complicated and less documented than v3. I've been thinking about writing a guide or giving some sample "search and replace" scripts to help. But that also seems too close to work to use my own time. So expect to see more Cortana stuff here:

• https://github.com/bw-kforce-ms for my experiments related to work (like a file based bot storage for V3)
• https://github.com/Microsoft/cortana-skills-samples (the official repository of samples I'm contributing to)

Unfortunately I hit a policy blocker on publishing skills - that has seen all my Cortana pet projects delayed or shelved.  However, I am happy that Safety Moments averages 6 requests a day on Windows.  Thanks to those who are using it!

Google Actions

I am happy about how Art of War is doing.  It gets about 60 users a week and sends about 200 messages. When I have time, I intend to get Colossal Cave launched on Google.  It was so close to being done on Cortana, and the server is written in Java and platform agnostic.