All the co-hosts are in the house for a change, having a fascinating discussion with Péter Bozsó, an Azure AppDev Consultant from Microsoft, Hungary. He gives us all the info on how to start writing Chatbots in Azure including tips and tricks, what not do to etc.   Media file: https://azpodcast.blob.core.windows.net/episodes/Episode255.mp3 The official MS Bot Framework website: https://dev.botframework.com/ All the open source bot-related MS repositories: https://github.com/Microsoft/botbuilder Community maintained repos related to the bot framework (stuff is actually getting merged from these into the official repos!): https://github.com/BotBuilderCommunity Cognitive Services: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/ The official bot framework blog: https://blog.botframework.com/ It’s a must have, a lot of best practices and tips and tricks are posted here.   And my personal blog, which is not full of content (yet!), but I am usually posting about Microsoft bots as well since that’s what I am working with every day: https://peterbozso.github.io/   Other updates: Azure SQL Data Warehouse now enables enhanced insights into analytical workloads by integrating directly with Microsoft Azure Monitor diagnostic logs. With this new capability, developers can analyze workload behavior over an extended time period and make informed decisions on query optimization or capacity management.   Azure Monitor diagnostic logs support customizable retention periods by saving the logs to a storage account for auditing purposes, the capability to stream logs to event hubs for near real-time telemetry insights, and the ability to analyze logs by using Azure Log Analytics with log queries. Diagnostic logs consist of telemetry views of your data warehouse equivalent to the most commonly used performance troubleshooting DMVs for SQL Data Warehouse.   For this initial release, we have enabled views for the following:  · sys.dm_pdw_exec_requests  · sys.dm_pdw_request_steps  · sys.dm_pdw_dms_workers  · sys.dm_pdw_waits  · sys.dm_pdw_sql_requests      AKS now in public preview in China Announcing the general availability of Azure Event Hubs for Apache Kafka® you don’t need to run Zookeeper, manage, or configure your clusters. From Deploy, develop, and troubleshoot faster with Azure Blockchain Workbench 1.5.0 https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deploy-develop-and-troubleshoot-faster-with-azure-blockchain-workbench-1-5-0/ Get started in minutes: Build your own enterprise grade virtual assistant https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/get-started-in-minutes-build-your-own-enterprise-grade-virtual-assistant/ Getting started with Azure Cognitive Services in containers https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/getting-started-with-azure-cognitive-services-in-containers/ Holiday season is DDoS season https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/holiday-season-is-ddos-season/ Sprint 143 Update of Azure DevOps https://review.docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes/2018/sprint-143-update?branch=releases%2FM143%2Freleasenotes#new-work-item-text-editor With container support, customers can use Azure’s intelligent Cognitive Services capabilities, wherever the data resides. This means customers can perform facial recognition, OCR, or text analytics operations without sending their content to the cloud. Custom Vision Service support for logo detection