Thursday 12 July 2018

Building Bots in Azure

I am starting to build Cortana bots. So far its been interesting.

I had trouble building the Azure function bots from template. The node.js example for the simple "echo" bot... First crack, the Azure "Test in Web Chat" didn't work. Errors implied there was a permission issue.

I tried again, and had a deployment error on the bot function template.

I tried again, and on the third try it deployed. To my knowledge, I did nothing differently.

The advantage of a function bot over a web app bot is supposedly pay per invocation (that should be cheaper, right)? The issue with the example code for node.js on the function bot is that every potential used library is embedded in the index.js code where the two line "echo" functionality is embedded in the middle!

WHY?  Why? Well, javascript as a language doesn't have a '#include' statement. Client side, you do the includes on the document for your browser to take care of.

In node, we have requires... that allows us to load modules. But why is this not used in the function bot example? I figure its a work around. But the down side is this: every time I edit the function in the portal for this example, I am touching a 200K line file! 




1 comment:

  1. Today to remove my bot tests from premium plans, I had to delete all my resources from the Azure portal. Subsequently, to create new bot projects from templates, I had to try 3 or 4 times before I had a successful deployment. Provisioning seems off - but it might be because I created new resources with names of resources I had deleted.

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