MSDN Blogs: Microsoft Bot Framework Resources

There are quite a few great tutorials, samples and videos around on Microsoft Bot Framework.

I thought it would be useful to keep a list on these running within this blog for easy reference.

This is meant to help and is not an endorsed list of recommendations (although there is great material here :-))

I will keep adding to this list as new material appears and please contact me if you think I am missing something!

 ****  GENERAL BOT FRAMEWORK LINKS ****

• Microsoft Bot Framework

Main landing page for MS Bot Framework

• Microsoft Bot Builder SDK

Github repo for the Bot Builder SDK (C# and node)

**** BOT FRAMEWORK TUTORIALS *****

• ‘Getting Started with Bots’  Microsoft Virtual Academy Course

Join experts Ryan Volum and Christopher Harrison as they help you get started creating your first bot. Learn about the many ways of communicating with the user, beyond just text, that Microsoft Bot Framework includes. And get the details on using LUIS to handle natural language processing. Plus, find out how to publish your bot to the world, allowing people to interact with it. See how to deploy the logic, how to register your bot, and how to add it to Skype. Get started now!

• TechDays Online 2016  Bot sessions

Three Bot sessions (45 mins each)  from a MS partner ‘Black Marble’ presented at Tech Days Online 2016 (me anchoring).

These sessions cover topics such as what are bots, building a Bot using the framework in C#, adding language understanding using LUIS and adding sentiment analysis using the Cognitive Service APIs

• 1st Session
• 2nd session
• 3rd session
• Code samples from these sessions

• Gary Pretty – Bot Framework Tutorials

A number of tutorials from Gary covering building a bot, publishing it, adding LUIS and improving the NLP experience

• Robin Osbourne – Debugging BotFramework locally using ngrok

In this article Robin shows you how to debug your bot code from Skype though to your local PC’s Visual Studio instance, using ngrok

• Robin Osbourne – Create your first QnA bot using botframework’s QnA Maker

Creating an FAQ bot using thre MS botframework QnA maker

• Anthony Chu – Embed the Bot Framework Web Chat as a Collapsible Window

Nice short tutorial illustrating how to implement bot framework chat within collapsible window

• Ankit Sinha – 4 part Bot Framework Tutorial:

Four part tutorial on MS Bot framework – links to other parts:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4

**** BOT FRAMEWORK SAMPLES ****

• Microsoft Bot Builder C# Samples

Microsoft Bot Builder official C# samples repo

• Microsoft Bot Builder Node Samples

Microsoft Bot Builder official Node samples repo

• Microsoft BotBuilder Samples

Microsoft bot framework engineering team samples  – both C# and Node

• ‘Bus Bot’ 

A node bot by Lilian Kasem that utilises the TFL API to  check bus times in London

• ‘Azure bot’

A bot that  enables admin of some Azure services via conversational UI

• ‘Auth Bot’

C# general authentication/authorisation Bot Framework sample by Mat Velloso

**** BOT ‘SMARTS’ – ADDING INTELLIGENCE TO YOUR BOT ****

• Microsoft Cognitive Services

Main landing page for Microsoft Cognitive Services

Featured applications:

https://www.microsoft.com/cognitive-services/en-us/applications

‘Seeing AI app’:

‘Recognition Tate’:

http://recognition.tate.org.uk/

• Language Understanding Intelligence Service (LUIS) – language intent

Main page about the LUIS functionality.

Portal for LUIS:

https://www.luis.ai/

• Text Sentiment Analysis

Microsoft Cognitive Service text analytics functionality – useful for detecting user sentiment within bot conversations

• Microsoft Graph API

The Microsoft Graph API enables single point of authentication and access to O365 functionality such as Onedrive, Excel, mail, calendar, user information etc. Adding a conversational UI to this can be very useful in many scenarios.