When experimenting with the new BotBuilder v4 Preview, the one thing that struck me was that all of the C# documentation required you to install a Visual Studio template. One of the major changes with v4 of the BotBuilder is that .Net Core is now supported! It seemed strange to have to rely on Visual Studio when we’re all going to be writing our bots using VS Code or even Rider Delving into the VS template (I just unarchived it…
Recently I had to integrate with a “delivery” web service that provided it’s own contracts as part of a NuGet package. My immediate thought was “sweet, now I don’t have to do all of that boring typing to add all of the requisite types”. That was until I ran into some code that looks similar to this:
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public abstract class BaseDeliverable { } public class CollectionDeliverable : BaseDeliverable { public string CollectionReference { get; set; } } public class QrCodeDeliverable : BaseDeliverable { public List<string> TicketIds { get; set; } public string QrCode { get; set; } } public class RequiresDocumentsDeliverable : BaseDeliverable { public List<Document> Documents { get; set; } } public class Delivery { public string Id { get; set; } public string Type { get; set; } public string State { get; set; } public string DisplayName { get; set; } public string Reference { get; set; } public List<BaseDeliverable> Deliverables { get; set; } } |
The problem When making calls to the delivery web service, the response was expected to be of type Delivery which is shown…
After recently starting to work with DialogFlow and Actions on Google, the one thing that I learned is that the documentation is really patchy and often provides snippets of JSON without the context of how everything should fit together. I’ll probably do a series of posts in this vein, but for this inaugural DialogFlow entry I’m going to focus on carousels! What is a DialogFlow carousel? Carousels in DialogFlow are used to present the user with multiple options such as…
With all the buzz around the release of .Net Core 2.0 many people are probably wondering how much effort it’s going to be to get their existing code over to .Net Core in Windows before they can even begin to think of making the app run in a cross-platform environment. Well, fear not! In this post, I’ll take a fairly simple Windows Service using the full .Net framework (4.6.1 to be exact) and convert it to a .Net Core 2.0…
In January this year I gave my first ever (lightning) conference talk! As well as a big thank you to the NDC submissions panel for thinking me worthy, I’d also like to extend my gratitude to all of the people who make NDC happen. As exciting as it was to be a speaker at such a high-calibre conference, for me, the truly best part was being able to see some amazing talks by some of the most accomplished (and smart)…
Introducing BotSpec! In part one of this series I outlined the problems with testing Bot Framework chatbots and how there is a real gap in the tooling available right now. Today I can happy announce the, what I would consider the first usable version, of my own chatbot testing framework is now available on NuGet! The goal for BotSpec is to provide a simple and discoverable interface for testing chatbots made the with Bot Framework. Hopefully I’m on the right…
Intro One of the great things about the Bot Framework is that, out of the box, there’s a bunch of channels to hook your bot up to without having to worry about any of the plumbing of communicating with those services. the currently supported list of channels can be found here (although, the newly announced Microsoft Teams has not been added to that list yet). But what do you do when the channels provided aren’t quite enough? That’s simple, you…
This is the first post in a series of posts where I will talk about my experiences trying to functionally tests chatbots built with the Bot Framework. This first post will cover the roadblocks that I encountered when trying to create functional tests that were easily reproducable and automatable. The rest of the series will look at a framework for testing Bot Framework chatbots that I have recently been developing. When I first started thinking about how to test chatbots…
Things I have learned making chatbots with LUIS When coupled with the Bot Framework, LUIS – at it’s core – provides utterance to intent mapping. More simply, it converts what a user says into what code your bot should run. In this post I’ll share the small insights that I have gained by building chat bots that use LUIS. This post is not meant to be a introduction to or and overview of LUIS. For that I would recommend this…
My first post is going to surface some information that is pretty difficult to find and doesn’t exist all in one place. Hopefully it will be of benefit other people using the Bot Framework. If you’ve used the Microsoft Bot Framework before, you’ll know that even though it’s well ahead of any other bot frameworks in terms of functionality, writing your bot code can be a bit tricky. There’s a bunch of hoops to jump through and the documentation isn’t…