Hello, I'm   Jason

You’ve had an Amazon Echo for years and have become accustomed to saying “Alexa, what’s my daily briefing” or “Alexa, what’s the weather for this weekend.” But, chances are if you are reading this post, you are a developer that would like to do more with Amazon Alexa. Maybe you’re not a Node.js or Python developer but a .NET developer. Maybe you have never used Amazon AWS but rather use Microsoft Azure. Well, this post will walk through creating an Alexa skill to check with GitHub to find out if we have any pending pull requests. Sure, this is a simple ask, but we’ll host this skill in Azure and wire up to the Alexa console.

When a new version of .NET Core is released, Azure may still be behind receiving the framework version. At any point, you can see what is installed within your Azure App Service by entering the Console within the Development Tools menu on the Azure App Service resource and typing dotnet --info:

Over 170 contributors have assisted GitHub in creating a GitHub API client library for .NET called Octokit.NET. The library targets .NET Framework 4.6+ and .NET Standard 2+ and above and makes it much easier to interact with the GitHub API. It’s quite easy to get started. If using a .NET Core application, from a command line you can use the dotnet installer tool by executing:

Microsoft will be releasing the brand new Flight Simulator on August 18, 2020 with Xbox Game Pass for PC. You can pre-order it now. It’s available for Windows 10 PCs in 4K ultra HD.

When developing .NET Core 3.1 applications or later, you may notice that Microsoft has changed to use the default dependency to System.Text.Json. The new serializer is very lightweight, but is still maturing. So, you may find that you need to add Newtonsoft JSON back in. To do this, we’ll first need to add a reference to the package by either running:

The ASP.NET team has a new experimental Razor editor available for Visual Studio 2019 16.7 Preview 4 for you to try out. The new editor has several performance benefits and will include a new Razor Language Server. For complete details, be sure to visit the devblogs on Microsoft at https://jasong.us/30fD7O9.

According to Windows Central, Microsoft Launcher 6 is now rolling out to Android devices. You can install it from Google Play by visiting https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.launcher. I’m running a Verizon Samsung Galaxy S10 5G device and still running the May 7, 2020 version.

One week from today, join Amazon and Alexa team leaders as they share the latest news about Alexa development. This half day free virtual event will kick off at 9am PDT/noon EDT with a keynote by VP of Alexa Devices & Developers, Nedim Fresko. There will be three main tracks: Skill Development, Device Development, and Development Services.

Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a Microsoft Azure solution to provide a content delivery network that can be distributed across various Azure regions. Microsoft also offers both the Akamai and Verizon CDN services through the Azure marketplace. For purposes of this post, we’ll focus on Microsoft’s own Azure CDN. This post will assume that you are familiar with Google Lighthouse and Azure CDN. If you are unfamiliar with Azure CDN, read my earlier post titled Setting up a CDN using Azure Storage.

In just 10 days, Microsoft will be holding it’s Xbox Series X Games event. The event will be streamed live on xbox.com, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch.