Personal-Bot | everyday things for me - Tasks

I am trying to deploy the latest Microsoft Virtual Assistant code. In the documentation, they describe a process to deploy and run the bot using a Visual Studio template. The whole process described in the documentation works great.

However, I don't like using a template. I don't want to loose Microsoft's Git history. Also, this deployment needs to stand the tests of time, and I want to make it as simple as possible to merge updates from Microsoft.

Inside of Microsoft's repo, there is a subdirectory containing the C# Virtual Assistant template and a sample of the code as if it were deployed by the template.

I'll describe my solution, which lets me preserve Microsoft's Git history, pull their latest commits with ease and still gives me a reasonably sized project for working on my client's bot deployment (the Microsoft AI repo is huge and contains many things I don't want in my bot deployment). The resulting branch/project that I'm working on very closely resembles (vide infra, appears identical to) the solution/project that I get when I create it from the template in Visual Studio.

1. I forked Microsoft's entire GitHub repo.
2. I setup a local Git repository with both Microsoft's repository and my fork as remotes.
3. I used Git subtree, as described on this Stack Overflow post to filter the repo down to just the Virtual Assistant C# sample code. I created a branch for this subtree.
4. I copied the subtree branch into a develop branch, where I intend to do all my custom development.
5. I can use master on Microsoft's upstream remote and the newly created subtree branch to continually pull new commits from Microsoft into my personal develop branch.

Here's some pseudo-code that roughly walks through the process.