Monat: März 2019

Rerun activities inside your Azure Data Factory pipelines

Data Integration is complex with many moving parts. It helps organizations to combine data and complex business processes in hybrid data environments. Failures are very common in data integration workflows. This can happen due to data not arriving on time, functional code issues in your pipelines, infrastructure issues etc. A common requirement is ability to rerun failed activities inside your data integration workflows. In addition to this, sometimes, you want to rerun activities to re-process the data due to some error upstream in data processing. Azure Data Factory now allows you to rerun activities inside your pipelines. You can rerun the entire pipeline or choose to rerun downstream from a particular activity inside your data factory pipelines.

Simply navigate to the ‘Monitor’ section in data factory user experience, select your pipeline run, click ‘View activity runs’ under the ‘Action’ column, select the activity and click ‘Rerun from activity <activityname>’

You can also view the rerun history for all your pipeline runs inside the data factory. Simply click on the toggle to ‘View All Rerun History’.

You can also view rerun history for a particular pipeline run by clicking ‘View Rerun History’ under the ‘Actions’ column. This allows you to see the different run attempts that you have made for your pipeline execution.

Learn more about rerunning activities inside your data factory pipelines.

Our goal is to continue adding features to improve the usability of Data Factory tools. Get started building pipelines easily and quickly using Azure Data Factory. If you have any feature requests or want to provide feedback, please visit the Azure Data Factory forum.
Quelle: Azure

Conversational AI updates for March 2019

We are thrilled to share the release of Bot Framework SDK version 4.3 and use this opportunity to provide additional updates for the Conversational AI releases from Microsoft.

New LINE Channel

Microsoft Bot Framework lets you connect with your users wherever your users are. We offer thirteen supported channels, including popular messaging apps like Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Kik, and others. We have listened to our developer community and addressed one of the most frequently requested features – added LINE as a new channel. LINE is a popular messaging app with hundreds of millions of users in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, and other countries.

To enable your bot in the new channel, follow the “Connect a bot to LINE” instructions. You can also navigate to your bot in the Azure portal. Go to the Channels blade, click on the LINE icon, and follow the instructions there.

SDK 4.3

In the 4.3 release, the team focused on improving and simplifying message and activities handling. The Bot Framework Activity schema is the underlying schema used to define the interaction model for bots. With the 4.3 release, we have streamlined the handling of some activity types in the Bot Framework Activity Schema, exposing a simple On* methods, thus simplifying the usage of such activities. On top of the activity handling improvements, for C# we have added MVC support, allowing developers to use the standard ASP.NET core application and ApiController. As with any release, we fixed a number of bugs, continue to improve LUIS and QnA integration, and further clean our engineering practices. There were additional updates across other areas like Language, Prompt and Dialogs, and Connectors and Adapters.

Review all changes that went into 4.3 in the detailed Change Log.
Stay up to date with the current list of all issues.

Simplify activity message handling

This release introduces a new way to handle incoming messages through a new class called ActivityHandler. An ActivityHandler receives incoming activities, as defined in the Bot Framework Activity Schema, then delegates the handling of each activity to one or more handler functions based on the activity’s type and other properties. For example, ActivityHandler exposes methods such as:

OnMessage – For dealing with all incoming messages
OnMembersAdded – For dealing with messages representing members being added
OnEvent – For generic event activities

You can find all the methods in the ActivityHandler.ts (for JavaScript) and ActivityHandler.cs (for .NET).

Using ActivityHandler, developers can handle events for incoming messages, application events, and a variety of conversation update events. This should make it easier to create common bot behaviors such as sending greetings and welcoming users.

This class provides an extensible base for handling incoming activities in an event-driven way. In JavaScript and TypeScript, the base ActivityHandler class can be used directly as main activity handler, as seen in the example code below. Developers can also derive subclasses from it to extend the core features.

Here is a small JavaScript code snippet example:

// Import the class from botbuilder sdk
const { ActivityHandler } = require('botbuilder');
// Create the bot “controller” object
const bot = new ActivityHandler();
server.post('/api/messages', (req, res) => {
adapter.processActivity(req, res, async (context) => {
// Route incoming activities to the ActivityHandler via the run() method
await bot.run(context);
});
});
// bind a handler for all incoming activities of type message
bot.onMessage(async (context, next) => {
// do stuff
await context.sendActivity(`Echo: ${ context.activity.text }`);
// proceed with further processing
await next();
});
// say hello when new members join
bot.onMembersAdded(async(context, next) => {
await context.sendActivity('Hello! I am a bot!');
await next();
});

Web API integration for .NET developers

A core tenant for the Bot Framework team is to drive parity across .NET and JS implementations. In that spirit, the .NET implementation of the ActivityHandler.cs exposes the same functionality with the given special programing language capabilities. However, ASP.NET Core provides a rich set of infrastructures supporting Web API, which can be easily integrated and used by bot developers. Therefore, in addition to the activity handling improvements, for C# we have added Web API support, allowing developers to use standard ASP.NET core application and ApiController.

Here is a simple code snippet for ASP.NET Web API Controller: 

[Route("api/messages")]
[ApiController]
public class BotController : ControllerBase
{
private IBotFrameworkHttpAdapter _adapter;
private IBot _bot;

public BotController(IBotFrameworkHttpAdapter adapter, IBot bot)
{
_adapter = adapter;
_bot = bot;
}

[HttpPost]
public async Task PostAsync()
{
// Delegate the processing of the HTTP POST to the adapter.
// The adapter will invoke the bot.
await _adapter.ProcessAsync(Request, Response, _bot);
}
}

Note, the _bot passed to _adapter.ProcesAsync method is the actual bot implementation and will handle any activity sent from the adapter, which has a very similar code to the above JS sample.

QnA Maker and Language Understanding

QnA Maker released Active Learning, which helps developers improve their knowledge base, based on real usage. Active learning helps identify and recommend question variations for any question and allows users to easily add them to their knowledge base.

For a user query, if QnA Maker returns top N answers where the difference in confidence score is low, Active Learning is triggered. Based on collective feedback across users, QnA Maker shows suggestions for alternate questions in your knowledge base.

To learn more about how QnA Maker Active Learning works and how to use it, read the documentation, “Use active learning to improve knowledge base.”

Templates and the Virtual Assistant Solution Accelerator

Templates and Solution Accelerators provide a mechanism to identify high growth opportunities for our Conversational AI, Speech, and broader Azure platform. These enable our customers and partners to accelerate delivery of advanced, transformational conversational experiences typically not viewed as possible or require too much effort to deliver a high-quality experience.

In this latest release we have provided significant updates to our Templates and Virtual Assistant solution. A high level summary of changes are covered in our Release Notes.

We are happy to share the availability of a JavaScript (Typescript) version of the Enterprise Template along with a Yeoman Generator. Work has started on the equivalent for the Virtual Assistant. We’ve also added coded unit tests to all Bots created by the templates providing a way to automate unit testing of dialogs along with further enhancements to the telemetry capabilities and the associated PowerBI dashboard.

We’ve also delivered a wide range of changes to the Virtual Assistant and Skills including a new template enabling Skills to be quickly created and added to a Virtual Assistant. There is also new support for proactive experiences, enabling the assistant and Skills to proactively reach out to a user or perform long running asynchronous operations.

Also, in this release are wide ranging improvements to the Productivity Skills including email, calendar, and to-do,  as well as the addition of FourSquare support to the Point of Interest Skill, and an enhanced WebChat test experience.

Web Chat 4.3

Web Chat is a popular component that lets developers add a messaging interface for their bot on the websites or mobile apps. Web Chat 4.3 release addresses the remaining accessibility issues and popular feature requests, like better indication of connectivity state for users with poor network connection.

To try Web Chat 4.3, follow the instructions on GitHub or explore code samples.

Get started

As we continue to improve our conversational AI tools and framework, we look forward to seeing what conversational experiences you will build for your customers. Get started today!
Quelle: Azure

Now available: Azure DevOps Server 2019

Following the launch of Azure DevOps in September, we’re pleased to announce the official release of Azure DevOps Server 2019! Previously known as Team Foundation Server (TFS), Azure DevOps Server 2019 brings the power of Azure DevOps into your dedicated environment. You can install Azure DevOps Server 2019 into any datacenter or sovereign, and determine when to apply updates.

About Azure DevOps Server

Azure DevOps includes developer collaboration tools which can be used together or independently, including Azure Boards (Work), Azure Repos (Code), Azure Pipelines (Build and Release), Azure Test Plans (Test), and Azure Artifacts (Packages). These tools support all popular programming languages, any platform (including macOS, Linux, and Windows) or cloud, as well as on-premises environments. Like with TFS, you control where you install Azure DevOps Server and when you apply updates. If you prefer to let us manage, use Azure DevOps Services which is available in more geographic regions than any other cloud hosted developer collaboration service.

Download Azure DevOps Server 2019

What’s new?

The release notes describe the major updates from TFS 2018 to Azure DevOps Server 2019, but my key highlights include:

The new navigation, which enables users to easily navigate between services, is more responsive and provides more space to focus on your work. But note this is a major UI overhaul – the largest we have done for several years, so please make sure your users are aware of the changes and update appropriate internal documentation as part of upgrading.
Azure Pipelines has been enhanced in many ways including new Build and Release pages, and support for YAML builds.
In addition to our existing integration between GitHub Enterprise and Azure Pipelines, which has been available in previous versions of TFS, Azure DevOps Server 2019 also enables integration of GitHub Enterprise commits and pull requests with work items in Azure Boards.
Organizations wishing to host Azure DevOps Server on their own virtual machines (VMs) on Azure can use Azure SQL Database instead of managing their own SQL Server VMs.
Azure Artifacts and Release Management licensing has evolved, making it simpler and more cost-effective for most customers.

Getting started

Whether your evaluating a new installation or planning an upgrade from a previous version of TFS, the following resources can help.

Azure DevOps Server 2019 Release Notes
Download Azure DevOps Server 2019
Product documentation (including the Installation Guide and Upgrade Guide)
System Requirements and Compatibility

Quelle: Azure