Virtual assistant template and integrating skills

Question

I have been trying the newly launched virtual assistant template (C#) of the bot framework, downloaded it from here https://github.com/microsoft/botframework-solutions/tree/master/templates/Virtual-Assistant-Template/csharp and deployed it using deployment scripts and the default setup works well.

As a next step, tried to add remote skill (few of the existing skills such as Calendar) using relevant script and it worked too.

Basic question we have is, would we need to download existing skill from here https://github.com/microsoft/botframework-solutions/tree/master/templates/Skill-Template/csharp and deploy it in our own Azure environment or can we just use already published skills such as thishttps://bftodoskill.azurewebsites.net/api/skill/manifest

If yes, that's perfect! however if not - will it make sense for the bot framework team to release skills as a service so that end users can simply consume already available and published skills in their virtual assistants?

Answer 1

Looks like they are in the process of working on the publish scripts for Skills:- https://github.com/microsoft/botframework-solutions/issues/1496.

However, you should be able to manually build the Skills by leveraging the source code located here (disclaimer: not tried myself): https://github.com/microsoft/botframework-solutions/tree/master/skills/src/csharp.

UPDATE: You can find the deployment scripts for a given Skill under the Deployment/Scripts folder in the root of the Skill's directory (e.g. /skills/src/csharp/calendarskill) in the repo. Instructions on how to run these scripts can be found at: https://github.com/microsoft/botframework-solutions/blob/master/docs/tutorials/assistantandskilldeploymentsteps.md.