In a post on the Coding4Fun blog, Channel 9 “Niner” Greg Duncan details how you can use your C# skills to create an Alexa Skill. Here, Duncan lays out the details on how he used his C# skills with AWS Lambda Service to create his Alexa Skill.
“I had spent a few days getting up-to-speed on Node and the environment (I’ve been working in client technologies for a long while remember) and using VS Code, which was fun. But using C# would have been more efficient for me (or so I thought). AWS Lambda services just announced they will support C# as the authoring environment for a Lambda service.
As it turns out, the C# Lambda support is pretty general so there is not compatibility in the dev experience for creating a C# Lambda backing a skill as there presently is for Node.JS development…at least right now. I thought it would be fun to try and was eventually successful, so hopefully this post finds others trying as well. Here’s what I’ve learned in the < 4 hours (I time-boxed myself for this exercise) spent trying to get it to work.
You will first need a set of tools. Here was my list:
- AWS Cloud Services account/login
- Visual Studio 2015 Community (Update 3)
- AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio
- Knowledge of C#/JSON
- Knowledge of creating an Alexa Skill
- A useful Alexa request/response serializer
If you are interested in the full Alexa C# GitHub solution, you can find it here.
While Channel 9 was spotlighting Amazon AWS, Cortana has some interesting things coming in 2017 with the recent release of new developer tools with Cortana Skills Kit and Cortana Devices SDK.
