Blog

Debugging Your Locally Hosted v4 Bot Using Azure Relays

This blog explains how to set up an Azure Relay resource, create the necessary relays in Visual Studio, and connect your locally hosted v4 bot for debugging across the various channels available in the Bot Framework ecosystem. Prerequisites: An Azure account (create a new account here) Access to Visual Studio .Net Framework 4.7 or .Net Core 2.1 installed (project dependent) Access….

Bot Analytics: Behind the Scenes

Application Insights is a great way to gather analytic information from all kinds of applications, including bots. An Application Insights resource in Azure provides an Analytics tool that allows you to run queries using the Kusto Query Language, also known as Log Analytics Query Language.   To get an idea of what queries you might want to run for a bot, you can switch….

Announcing Bot Framework SDK and Tools 4.1 Release

We are excited to announce the release of Bot Framework SDK version 4.1 that includes General Availability of the Bot Framework Emulator, the Web Chat V4, and version 4.1 of the C# and JavaScript SDKs. With version 4.1 of the SDK and tools, the team is focusing on periodical releases of the SDK and tools. Streamline testing and integration using….

Announcement: Azure Bot Service Enforcing Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2

On December 4th, 2018, the Azure Bot Service will require all connections to be secured using Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.2. This enforcement is critical to providing the best possible security for your data. Microsoft, the Payment Card Industry (PCI), and the entire Internet community, are moving away from TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1, which have been shown to be….

BotBuilder Community is making it easier to build great bots!

The Microsoft Bot Framework communities on Github, StackOverflow, our MVPs, and others have been fantastic partners as we’ve matured from a hackathon project to the generally available (GA) Azure Bot Service. It was feedback from these communities that led us to our latest Bot Framework tools and SDKs release; built from the ground up to integrate with a developer’s workflow….

Enhanced Direct Line Authentication Features

This blog covers the new enhanced authentication features available for the Direct Line channel. For implementation examples of the concepts discussed here, please see this blog post. Azure Bot Service authentication The features discussed here are built on top of Azure Bot Service authentication. Azure Bot Service authentication enables you to authenticate users to and get access tokens from a….

Using WebChat with Azure Bot Service’s Authentication

[Updated on 5/31/2019] This blog covers how to use Web Chat with the Azure Bot Service’s built-in authentication capability to authenticate chat users with various identity providers such AAD, GitHub, Facebook, etc, including best practices on how to ensure a secure experience. This tutorial also covers where the built-in authentication features are currently supported and where they are not. Step 1: Registering Connections and….

Sign-In experiences

This blog post discusses the options for creating various sign-on experiences when using WebChat. Sign-on experiences enable the bot to identify the users who are part of a conversation and to perform actions on users’ behalf against identity providers. For example, a bot can ask a user to sign-in to Office 365 so that the bot can check the user’s….

Testing authentication to your bot using the Bot Framework Emulator

In this blog post, we’ll show you how to test bot authentication capabilities from Azure Bot Service using the Bot Framework Emulator. You’ll learn what is required to set up in the Emulator to use OAuthCards as well as various options for interacting with OAuthCards. When the bot sends an OAuthCard to the user, the user will have an opportunity….

How to properly send a greeting message and common issues from customers

A very common chat/conversational feature that bot developers need to implement, is how to create an initial welcome or greeting message when a user initially begins interacting with the bot (say, the first time they open web chat). One issue some customers have been having lately, is that when using trying the conversationUpdate, is that their bot behaves as expected….