So… a LOT has happened/come out since the last time I stood in front of a group of people. And that’s a good thing. Long story short, you can now create/develop/do for/with Cortana in ways that previous weren’t possible or easily manageable. Now? All that is out the window and you can do pretty much whatever you want — in terms of grabbing and processing data to be displayed via the Cortana Canvas. Which is doggone near the holy grail, neh?

Thanks to the folks who decided to eschew John Papa’s talk and hung out with me and my other favorite girl (after My Queen!) in the early-ish hours of 3/17. Here’s the slide deck… not that there’s a whole lot there for the folks who chose not to attend.

UPDATE:
I ran into a myriad of issues with connectivity throughout the presentation. So what should have been easy, bite-sized demos became a tedium of tap-dancing while waiting on connections to be re-established. What it means for the people who were there (and you as well, by the way) is that I felt honor-bound to append more slides to the deck which provide examples of what we couldn’t get to. I also included the source code of my external dll (that is called from within the Azure Function) as well as an offline copy of the Function Bot itself. I recommend that you DO NOT simply try to deploy this bot; if you do, things will not link/sync up correctly and you will get some very frustrating issues. Instead, simply copy and paste the entire BasicLuisDialog.csx file into an Azure Functions Bot that you generate in Azure via the Create Resource workflow. Check the top level read.me file in the archive for more information. Also, don’t forget to get your own Toggl.com account so that you can add your Toggl API key to the External Libray Source\Integrations\Constants.cs file.

Anyway, here’s the stuff; it’s nearly 14MB in size.

Happy Coding!