Troubleshoot your Copilot plugins with Developer Mode

Key Takeaways

so you've started building co-pilot plugins for Microsoft 365 but what if co-pilot doesn't call your plug-in is the problem in your code or is it co-pilot is co-pilot even trying to call you in this video I'll show you how to enable developer mode in co-pilot to help with troubleshooting and to help you learn how co-pilot is calling your plug-in hi I'm Bob German Cloud developer advocate for Microsoft before I show you developer mode let's take a minute to review how co-pilot plugins work there are two ways to extend co-pilot plugins and graph connectors as shown in this diagram Microsoft 365 has a semantic index that indexes all the content in Microsoft 365 along with permissions and other metadata when you prompt co-pilot an orchestration layer looks up information in the semantic index and uses it to augment The Prompt this is the rag or retrieval augmentation generation pattern that you may have heard of one way to extend co-pilot is to add more content to the semantic index that's what graph connectors can do another way is to write a plugin which allows co-pilot to do realtime queries of your plug-in co-pilot for Microsoft 365 uses an app manifest to Define these queries here's the Manifest for the Northwind inventory sample which you may have seen at ignite or in other videos this is a teams message extension based on the Azure bot framework at the time of this recording it's the most complete plug-in model so I'll use it here notice the title and description these are used by co-pilot as well as by umans to learn what your plug-in can do you want to provide plenty of detail and then we have these commands there are three of them here which Define the types of queries that your plug-in can handle but what what if co-pilot doesn't get it and it doesn't call your plug-in well first you'll want to check the plug-in panel to make sure your plugin is enabled next I'll type minus developer on to enable developer mode now watch what happens when I issue a prompt please find Northwind meat products selling for less than full retail notice that I'm mentioning Northwind which is part of the plug-in name as a hint to co-pilot as you can see it works and then developer mode displays extra information telling me which plugin and command it used very helpful in determining what's going on as you can see co-pilot matched my request for product selling Below Retail to the discount search command and it got back a successful result if co-pilot isn't calling your Plugin or if it's trying to use the wrong command the problem is most likely in the descriptions in your manifest test I had to tweak these several times to make the north wind sample more reliable and of course when you're done just type minus developer off to disable developer mode if you like this video please give it a like and tell your friends if you'd like to keep up with all our new Microsoft 365 developer videos please hit subscribe as well thanks