Bots Secured Behind a Firewall & Teams 

Contacts: Daniel Evans, CK Kashyap, Mark Franco Goal  Host a bot behind a firewall and allow conversations with the bot using Teams. The implication of “bot behind a firewall” is that the network connectivity to/from the bot is restricted to only the necessary machines (IP addresses).  The reference network architecture below illustrates how a Bot may be run inside a Virtual Network(VNET) that allows traffic only to and from a set of IP addresses that….

Embed a bot in a web page using Web Chat

This post describes how to embed a bot in a web page using the Bot Framework Web Chat. The Web Chat control is a highly-customizable web-based client for the Bot Framework V4 SDK. It uses the  Direct Line channel, associated with the bot, to allow the user to talk with the bot from within the web page. In its essence, this….

Build 2020 – Conversational AI updates

Build 2020 is here and in this video we summarize all of the announcements within the area of conversational AI, across Bot Framework SDK, Azure Bot Service and the Cognitive Services (LUIS, Speech, QnA Maker). If you would prefer to read about the announcements, you can read our blog post over on Microsoft Tech Community at https://aka.ms/Build20-ConversationalAIBlog, which also contains links….

Bot Framework Community Focus – February 2020

One of the best things about working on the Bot Framework here at Microsoft is the phenomenal community that surrounds the SDKs, tools and platforms. Whether it is contributing to the core Microsoft repositories, working as part of the Bot Framework Community GitHub project, building other open source extensions, or helping to educate other developers via online and in-person content….

Using Adaptive Cards with the Microsoft Bot Framework

Introduction Adaptive Cards are a way to present a self-contained UI to a user within a larger UI such as a chat client. They incorporate almost all of the functionality of the Bot Framework’s rich cards, and they also provide some special functionality of their own. They are supported in Web Chat, Cortana, and Microsoft Teams, and can even be used outside….

Microsoft discontinues the ability to create new SDK V3 Bots. Deployed V3 bots will continue to run without interruption.

Microsoft Bot Framework SDK V4 was released in September 2018, and since then we have shipped a few dot-release improvements. As announced previously, the V3 SDK is being retired with final lifetime support ending on December 31st, 2019. Existing V3 bot workloads will continue to run without interruption. We have no plans to disrupt any running workloads. Accordingly, Microsoft will discontinue the….

Using the Facebook Messenger Handover Protocol with the Microsoft Bot Framework

The Facebook Messenger Platform offers a handover protocol that allows your Facebook page to pass “thread control” between primary and secondary receivers. A thread can be thought of like a Facebook Messenger conversation in this case, and the idea of thread control is that one receiver is the “thread owner” that receives all messages and can reply to them or….

Bot Creation User Experience Survey

Hello Bot Users, We’re looking for feedback on your experience creating bots using Bot Framework. As such we’ve put together a short survey consisting of 10 questions that we hope you will complete for us. It should only take a minute of your time and will be very useful for our team as we continue to improve and innovate. Survey….