Maybe you used one and thought it was useful and want to try to build one yourself.

Maybe your company wants to have a chatbot to answer some of the commonly asked questions.

Regardless of the reason, you want to venture into developing a chatbot.

So, to save you some pain, in this post, I am going to share with you how to set up a development environment for the bot framework v4.

Things are always changing and the content in this post may not 100 reflect on the development experience later down the line.

Chatbot development uses.Net Core, which is multiplatform unlike.Net Framework.

If you are running into issues talking to the bot, use version 3.

Bot Framework Emulator Mac Is Fixed

Version 4.1.0 of the Bot Framework Emulator is out now and the bug on mac is fixed.

You can use either version 3 or 4, the post have instructions to use both versions.

For the bot template, choose the Basic Bot C project instead of the echo bot.

A LUIS app got generated when you created your web app bot on Azure.

It will have the same name as your chatbot with some random alphanumeric value added to the end.

In the Bot Management section, select Build and click on the Download Source Code button.

Bot Framework Emulator Code For The

This will generate the source code for the bot and download it to your local machine.

Updating a settings file and connecting the bot to the bot framework emulator.

To find the bot file path and bot file secret, go to your Azure web app bot then go to App Service Settings Application Settings.

If your bot successfully initializes then you will get a web page popup that says your bot is ready.

In either case, you need to have your bot running locally already.

In Visual Studio, right click on your root project in the solution explorer and there is an option to publish.

Youll be presented with a list of web app bots to deploy your local changes to.

Select the bot you want to deploy your changes to and let Visual Studio handle the rest.

To test the bot, on Azure go to the web app bot then Bot Management Test in Web Chat.

Chat with the bot to see the changes you made and verify you still have a working bot.