Debug C# Cortana Skill Locally

I added a video on how to create a Skill in the cloud, compile it there, then suck it back to a desktop, set debug break points, and continue to debug locally.It doesn't have commentary yet, but I'll get to it.

Teach Your Kids to Code

Today at work we had Bring Your Kids who got an Hour of Code.... Teaching your kids to code! Super cool. They started here... Minecraft . And now I get to send them here... Robot Odyssey . Right on.

Well Gosh. I changed employers.

I will still be blogging about and making chatbots. But I don't work indirectly at Microsoft anymore!

And I might blog about using the Groupon API too! And making a Groupon skill...

Decoding JWTs and Bot Service Auth tokens

Ever wonder how to decode a JWT token to get at the email address and user name?  Given that you have the openid, email, and profile scopes granted.


Visit JWT.io for decoder and doc.

Of if you love (trust?) Microsoft, ADFS JWT Decoder.

And the full blown specifation on RFC7519...

And then the openid documentation on how to get name and email.

     // header, payload, signature
     function parseJwt (token) {
            let ary = token.split('.');
            if( ary.len != 3)
                {
                console.log( "not a JWT: " + token );
                return undefined;
                }
            // assume it IS urlEncoded
            let base64Url = ary[1];
            let base64 = base64Url.replace(/-/g, '+').replace(/_/g, '/');
            let txt = Buffer.from(base64, 'base64').toString();
            return JSON.parse( txt ); 
        };

And then

let jwt = parseJwt(tokenStr);
let email = jwt.email || jwt.upn || 'unknown';
let name = jwt.name;
console.log( `You are ${name} at ${email}` );

But there is more cool stuff you can do via Bot Framework! For example, want to re-use an Auth Token? Use this class to send off requests piggy-backing (using on-behalf-of) on the Bot's app registration.

Then, you can also use Bot Framework's JWT decoder in C#. Use this class to decode the properties into a hashmap.

SImulated Annealing

Slowly putting up historical github code.

https://github.com/bswieser/omdi/tree/master/anneal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_annealing

wp-login

Hi. Seems since I put up my server I get a swarm of hits on my Apache server trying to exploit WordPress, or pounding on my FTP and SSH services...

90 day new user estimates

Looking at how many users on Google or Microsoft are using my skills.

	Microsoft	Google
Art of War	23	540
Safety Moments	54	101
Meditations	12	67
Ambient Sounds	65
AutoMate	5

Art of War wins on Google. Ambient Sounds wins on Microsoft. And hey, for all this effort, at least Google is sending me a T-Shirt. I suspect Colossal Cave will beat them all...

Google tells me on average 15 new users a day try Art of War.