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Create Your First Bot With Microsoft Bot Framework

In this article, we will create our first bot using Microsoft Bot Framework.

What Is A Bot Framework?

Bot framework provides the tool to create, test and deploy an intelligent bot.

To set up the bot environment, we will follow these steps

Install visual studio (if not installed on your system). I have installed visual studio 2019 on my machine.
Download the file "BotFramework-Emulator-main.zip" (you can download it from the link provided by the end of this article) and copy it on the following path.

C:\Users\<user_name>\Documents\Visual Studio 2019\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual C#

Download the emulator from the following link - https://github.com/Microsoft/BotFramework-Emulator/releases/tag/v4.5.2

Once the setup is downloaded, install the emulator.
To show the Microsoft Bot Framework template in the visual studio, download vsix file of "Bot Framework v4 SDK Templates for Visual Studio" from visual studio marketplace

Click on the "Download" button to download the vsix file. Once the file is downloaded, click on the file to install.

To create a new project

Click on the "New" → "Project…"
A popup window will appear where you can select the project type. Select the project type as "Bot Application".

Once the project is created, click on the option "Manage NuGet Packages..."
Once the NuGet window will open. This message will appear - "Some NuGet packages are missing from this solution. Click to restore from your online package sources". Click on the "Restore" button.

You are ready with your first bot.

To run the bot.

Change the URL from http://localhost:3979/ to http://localhost:3979/api/messages
Following screen will come.

Enter the "Bot URL" as http://localhost:3979/api/messages and click on the "Connect" button.
Your chat window will appear. Enter the text "hi" and you will get the following output.

Query/Feedback