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!

apple.news/Ay7R0K7ofR7SNumgHF-k93Q

If you’re using a Windows 10 computer, just type “Cortana Notebook” into the Start menu. You should see a new item called Connected Home. After you enable this, Cortana can connect to smart home services like Hue, SmartThings, Nest, Insteon and Wink.

Source: Cortana can command your smart home devices on Windows 10

One other thing; to get it to work (after you’ve linked a service to Cortana), the “formula” is to say one of the following:

• Ask {Invocation Name} {Utterance}
• Tell {Invocation Name} {Utterance}
• Use {Invocation Name} {Utterance}
• Get {Invocation Name} {Utterance}
• Have {Invocation Name} {Utterance}

In my case it was “use Insteon to turn on the TV backlighting”.

More technical information here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cortana/design-guides/guide-invocation

I had a great time today at Kennesaw State University with a very cool crew of folks who wanted to learn more about one of my favorite topics: Cortana Skills. (“Does this guy ever talk about anything else?” LOL!)

There have been several changes to the slide deck since the last time presented it due to a few exciting, real-world developments have occurred.

Anyway, slides: https://1drv.ms/f/s!AqKcjfYvOvTcm_dRSgfP2HtIpZSuJQ

Happy Coding!

I read an article found on Lifehacker (http://lifehacker.com/5932586/make-work-feel-less-like-work-with-the-8020-rule) that resonates with me.

The funny thing is, most of us are already doing this anyway, albeit not in the way we think. The majority of the american workforce steals time for themselves every day. In fact, certain working methodologies allow for this and assume that the “ideal” workday is somewhere between 75% and 81%. True indeed, some of that “extra” time is given to meetings and what not, but on average at least a full hour is viewed as non-productive, every day.

https://www.officevibe.com/blog/technology-destroying-work-life-balance

I had the pleasure of attending and speaking to a group of folks today at Orlando Code Camp. The topic? Cortana Skills. Not to be confused with Alexa Skills (though you can easily import Alexa Skills that you’ve already created!)

Here is the slide deck that we covered.

Thanks for attending folks!

So, apparently I was just banned by Quora.com’s moderation crew. I have no idea if that was automated or by a real person. 

My response…

I’ll keep you posted with the play-by-play on what the heck is going on.
Me? I’m going to take a breather from the “need” to help an organization that obviously doesn’t pay enough attention to its own policies OR has a very heavy-handed way of dealing with “disputes” (of which I have none but one or more folks might be pissed at me from pointing out their obvious commercials on Quora’s site). 

And I’m going to seriously reflect on whether or not I should devote so much time to a community site that devotes absolutely nothing to me, one of its “top contributors”. 

This will be the case even if they’ve been hacked and I’m just an unfortunate casualty.