Chat Bot Slots - proof of concept game using Bot Framework

I've been having a lot of fun with the Bot Framework recently, and today I'm publishing my second project (the first was http://jsontocsharp.net/) built with this amazing framework - Chat Bot Slots.

It's a very simple slots game, which runs entirely in a Skype chat. The game stores all profile data in a CosmosDB, so all your winnings are safe and quickly accessible across the globe.

The UI is based on Prompt dialogs and built-in Skype smileys. Note - due to weird Skype bug, if you use a lot of smileys in your messages, some of them just randomly disappear, so after some trials I've just found and used some that are not affected by this issue.

The game was created just for fun, the player always (well, almost) wins, so go spin and enjoy it!

http://chatbotslots.com

Build your startup on Azure. Part 2: Creating and publishing the project

This is the second blog post in a "Build your startup on Azure" series. You can find the first one here.

The app we're going to build needs just one Web API controller which handles data requests, and a static website based on bootstrap starter kit.

For JsonStorage.net I'll use DocumentDB (yes, one more Azure service) as a back-end storage, It has native .NET API and provides awesome performance - just take a look at a latency graph:

Build your startup on Azure. Part 1: JsonStorage.net

Microsoft Azure has so many features these days, that it's very easy to get lost in Azure portal - you can setup and scale web apps, databases, even deploy Sitecore in a few clicks.
But really cool thing about it is that you can manage the entire life cycle of your app - from purchasing a domain to scaling load and diagnosing production exceptions without leaving the portal.

In this blog post series I'll show how easy it is to build your own startup type of project in a matter of hours, using Azure tool set.

The project I'll create is a simple web service for storing JSON data. It is useful in scenarios when you need to communicate between the different systems, like server-side service and a web app or even mobile app, as shown at a scheme below. Kind of simplified "service bus".