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Latest Version
Avg Release Cycle
81 days
Latest Release
1232 days ago

Changelog History
Page 1

  • v4.11.0 Changes

    November 13, 2020

    November 2020 (version 4.11.0)

    πŸš€ Welcome to the November 2020 release of the Bot Framework SDK. We continue to focus on code quality, improving developer experience, customer requests, overall SDK improvements and partner support. We are previewing a new Cloud Adapter and other exciting things, including:

    • πŸ›  Teams Introduction of Teams Meeting Participant API along with new features and fixes.
    • Skills We continue our 'skills everywhere!' mission by reducing development friction, enabling interruptions, and additional features.
    • πŸš€ Composer Continued improvements in deployment, Skills integration, features flags, and more!
    • πŸ‘ Orchestrator (preview) Improved samples, models, and Bot Framework Composer support
    • πŸ“š Bot Framework Documentation We've added Adaptive Dialog support, updated docs around Adaptive Expressions, and custom .lg functions.
    • πŸ”€ CLI Improvements to merging and importing of dialogs and assets
    • Virtual Assistant Improved core runtime, advancements in skills features
    • πŸ— Power Virtual Agents Thanks to the Bot Framework SDK, it is easier and easier to build a PVA Bot!
    • πŸ‘ HealthBot Health Bot, built using the Bot Framework, continues to advance in support of multiple Health related initiatives!

    Insiders : Want to try new features as soon as possible? You can download the nightly Insiders build [C#] [JS] [Python] [CLI] and try the latest updates as soon as they are available. And for the latest Bot Framework news, updates, and content, follow us on Twitter @msbotframework!

    Microsoft Teams

    Continued improvements enabling features for creating bots and apps in Teams.

    • Get Participant Meeting API
    • πŸ‘ CacheInfo support on Invoke responses
    • OAuthInput fix
    • πŸ‘ Meeting specific notification support
    • Add on_teams_team_renamed (python only)

    Skills

    βœ… To reduce development friction, you can now run and test skills locally with the Emulator without needing an AppId and password.

    πŸš‘ Quality for skills is critical, and we're making large invements in automated testing. That work is (mostly) still in the design phase, and feedback is very welcome:

    We're also continuing to bring features to skills to enable additional scenarios:

    • Interruptions are enabled in BeginSkill.
    • ⚑️ Update and Delete activities from a skill.

    Overall SDK Improvements

    πŸš€ Code quality and testing infrastructure have continued to be a focus for the this SDK release.

    • 0️⃣ The default branch on all repositories has been renamed to 'main'.
    • We have improved typing and transcript logger middleware behavior and error handling.
    • βœ… Dotnet SDK tests have been ported to xunit.
    • πŸ”§ Configurable Adaptive Dialog cycle detection.
    • Form Dialog preview

    πŸ“š Documentation

    πŸ“š Updates and improvements to existing documentation have continued.

    • πŸ“š Updated and expanded documentation for adaptive dialogs.
    • ⚑️ Updated and reorganized the security and authentication topics.
    • ⚑️ Updated information about: .lg custom functions, adaptive expressions, and memory scopes.
    • βž• Added Java (preview) reference documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/java/api/?term=microsoft.bot.builder
    • βž• Added information on how to use the Bot Framework CLI commands in support of various adaptive dialog features.
    • πŸ“š Updated skills documentation.
    • The claims validator is now required for bot a skill and skill consumer.
    • ⚑️ Updated information about Direct Line extensions.
    • ⚑️ Updated how to connect to some of the channels: Slack, Webex.
    • πŸ“„ Archived the SDK v3 content, available at: https://docs.microsoft.com/previous-versions/azure/bot-service/index-bf-sdk
    • ⚑️ Updated information about the dialogs library and the overall architecture of a bot.

    Cloud Adapter (not yet feature complete, dotnet only)

    πŸ”§ The Cloud Adapter introduces an enriched configuration model and enables hosting a bot in any cloud environment.

    • πŸ‘Œ Supports the Bot Framework protocol and auth model.
    • πŸ”§ All the constants defining the auth model are configurable.
    • Note: 4.11.0 does not have full feature parity with BotFrameworkAdapter
      • Streaming support, OAuthPrompt support and full Skill support are coming soon.
      • Preview: The recommendation is to continue using BotFrameworkAapter in the 4.11.0 release unless the environment requires configurable auth constants.

    Orchestrator Preview

    Orchestrator is a Language Understanding arbitration (β€œdispatch”) technology to route incoming user utterances to an appropriate skill or to subsequent language processing service such as LUIS or QnA Maker.

    • ⚑️ It is a transformer based solution that is optimized for conversational AI applications.
    • It is built to run locally in your bot.
    • It is written in C++ and is available as a library in C#, Node.js and soon Python and Java.
    • πŸš€ The current release is designed to be used only for intent detection. Entity recognition is on the roadmap.
    • Orchestrator can be used in code-first solutions or directly in Composer.
      πŸ“š This is a preview release with improved documentation and language models.

    CLI

    • πŸ”€ The CLI will now download an merge dialog assets.
    • πŸ”€ Ordering of names while merging.
    • πŸ”¦ Expose import resolver interface for cross-train/luis:build/qnamaker:build
    • πŸ‘ Region support in lg translate

    Virtual Assistant

    • Skills improvements
    • ⚑️ Core runtime design updates

    Composer

    HealthBot

    ⬆️ The Health Bot Service is a cloud platform for virtual health assistants and health bots, Health Bot uses Bot Framework under the hood. With the latest upgrade to the Bot Framework SDK V4 foundation, Health Bot can be called as a Bot Framework skill or call subsequent custom Bot Framework skills. See more here: Health Bot Overview.

    Power Virtual Agents

    βœ… Power Virtual Agents (PVA) is part of Microsoft Power Platform. In PVA, chatbots can be created with a guided, no-code graphical interface - and without the need for data scientists or developers. In the latest integration with Bot Framework SDK, PVA can be extended to create custom solutions.

    • πŸ‘‰ Use Bot Framework Composer to create and connect to Bot Framework skills.
    • Publish directly from Bot Framework Composer to PVA portal into PVA Topics runtime (coming soon).

    πŸ”Š 4.11.0 Change Logs

  • v4.10 Changes

    August 18, 2020

    August 2020 (version 4.10.0)

    πŸš€ Welcome to the August 2020 release of the Bot Framework SDK. We are introducing some exciting Additional New Features with Updates and Enhancements. This milestone we focused on all-up quality and engineering debt, broken down across the following pillars:

    πŸ“š Documentation Includes improvements to existing documentation and net new documentation centered on recurring issues and developer pain points.

    πŸ‘€ Customer Supportability Improvements focused on developers seeking assistance using the Bot Framework, tools and SDKs.

    Customer Ask Implemented enhancements and feature requests from the developer community and 3rd parties using the Bot Framework SDK and tools.

    βœ… Code Quality Enforcement of code styling and format rules, increased testing code coverage, and functional tests.

    πŸ— Team Agility Improved validation of SDK code and integration with supporting libraries and environments. Continuous integarion and build pipleline improvements.

    Insiders : Want to try new features as soon as possible? You can download the nightly Insiders build [C#] [JS] [Python] [CLI] and try the latest updates as soon as they are available. And for the latest Bot Framework news, updates, and content, follow us on Twitter @msbotframework!

    πŸ“š Documentation

    πŸ“„ BF Docs GitHub

    πŸ“š Following feedback from customers and the Bot Framework Support Team,β€―a number ofβ€―net new documents have been written as well as updates to existing documentation.β€―These are helpful towards providingβ€―answers and information relating to recurring issues from bot developers.

    • πŸ“š Code comment documentation
    • Samples readme improvements
    • ⚑️ SDK repository readme and wiki updates
    • πŸ†• New documents addressing recurring bot developer issues

    πŸ‘ Customer Supportability

    πŸ‘ BF Supportability GitHub

    πŸ‘€ Developers using the Microsoft Bot Framework have many avenues for getting help. See additional resources Internal tools have been improved to increase the responsiveness of the engineering team in areas of most interest to developers.

    • πŸ‘ Creation of internal bots and improved tools for customer support
    • πŸ‘Œ Improved analytics of trends in customer reported feature requests and issues
    • Coordination of labels across GitHub repositories

    Customer Ask

    BF Customer Ask GitHub

    • βž• Additional Teams channel lifecycle events
    • πŸ‘Œ Improved Application Insights integration
    • Coordination of labels across Git Hub repositories
    • βž• Add Locale to ConversationUpdate
    • ⚑️ Update CardAction to support alt text for images on buttons
    • ⚑️ Update Skill Handler to return Resource Response
    • πŸš€ Release of library using latest Azure Blobs storage
    • Enable custom fields for Entity
    • πŸ›  Fixes to OAuthPrompt timeout and addition of EndOnInvalidMessage
    • πŸ›  Various bug fixes and telemetry improvements

    Code Quality

    • πŸ’… Analyzer rules in place and running (code style and format)
    • βœ… Unit test code coverage and quality
    • Increased profiling of the code base
    • Swagger file unified across SDK repositories and version # introduced
    • Specific SDKs asks and needs:
      • Settings object pattern for C# adapters
      • LG dependent files testing (C#)
      • Dependency policing (JS)
      • Integration tests with Direct Line JS and adaptive cards

    Team Agility

    BF Team Agility GitHub

    πŸ‘Œ Improvements have been made across SDK repositories towards decreased CI pipeline times, improved testing, including both functional integration and unit tests.

    Speed​

    • ⬇️ Reduce time to build for SDKs (local and remote)​
    • πŸ”¨ Reduce SDK unit test duration through refactoring and/or concurrent approaches​
    • πŸ”¨ Refactor ADO pipelines into smaller, separate jobs or stages​
    • πŸ’… Run as-applicable pipelines (e.g. no style-checks on .yaml files)​

    ​Reliability​

    • Refine or replace current monorepo/”mono-solution” setups as necessary​
    • βž• Address nondeterministic build/test failures
    • Enable continuous integration for forked pull request submissions
    • βœ… Complete integration tests added with bots dynamically created

    ⚑️ Other Updates and Enhancements

    • πŸ‘ Microsoft Teams Continued improvements to Microsoft Teams API support
    • πŸ— Bot Framework CLI Tools Lg added as core plugin, publish preview builds to npm, other improvements
    • ⚑️ Bot Builder Samples Readme updates, CI improvements, new Teams Typescript samples
    • πŸ‘ Composer Advancements in Skills support and Cognitive Services integration
    • 🌐 Web Chat Many Accessibility improvements
    • ⚑️ Emulator Bug fixes and updates

    Microsoft Teams

    • πŸ‘ SDK and OAuthPrompt now support Teams SSO
    • πŸ‘ Increased Adaptive Dialog support for Teams events
    • βͺ SDK supprot for lifecyle events: ChannelRestored, TeamArchived, TeamUnarchived,TeamRestored, TeamDeleted, and TeamHardDeleted
    • ⚑️ InstallationUpdate activity type support
    • πŸ›° LinkToMessage added to MessageActionsPayload

    Bot Framework CLI Tools

    • πŸ”Œ Lg added as BF-CLI core plugin
    • ✨ Enhancements and fixes to lu parser
    • πŸ‘ QnaMaker support extended
    • πŸ— Publish daily builds and RCs of botframework-cli to npm

    Samples

    • ⚑️ Readme updates and consolidation across language samples
    • πŸ— Build pipelines for samples CI
    • ⚑️ Demonstreate using Locale in ConversationUpdate welcome message sample
    • βž• Additional Teams samples in Typescript
    • πŸ“„ Teams TaskModule samples now includes HTML/JavaScript task modules

    Composer

    • πŸ‘ The Bot Framework SDK continues to support the Bot Framework Composer.

    πŸš€ See Composer 1.1.1 Release Notes

    🌐 Web Chat

    • πŸ›  Many accessibility improvements and fixes
    • Group activity by timestamp and sender
    • Convert emoticon to Emoji
    • βž• Added scrolling API: allow save/restore scroll position and scroll to specific activity

    Emulator

    • βž• Added an additional log panel entry on conversation start that displays the current bot's endpoint
    • πŸ›  Fixed a bug where trying to open the sign-in link on an OAuth card when ngrok was not configured would cause the Windows File Explorer to open
    • πŸ‘Œ Improved CONTRIBUTING.md to more accurately reflect requisites to build the Emulator from source
    • ⚑️ Updates to Cosmos DB service editor dialog

    βž• Additional New SDK Features

    πŸ— Orchestrator: Transformer based solution that runs locally with your bot to dispatch across one or more Bot Builder Skills or LUIS applications or QnA Maker Knowledgebase.

    πŸ— Microsoft.Bot.Builder.Azure.Queues (preview) Enables more easily interacting with Azure Queues and ContinueConversationLater Dialog. (Currently .NET only, coming soon to other languages)

    πŸ— Microsoft.Bot.Builder.Azure.Blobs BlobsStorage and BlobsTranscriptStore implementations replacing AzureBlobStorage and AzureBlobTranscriptStore. This library uses Azure.Storage.Blobs and is a replacement for the older Microsoft.Azure.Storage.Blob used by Microsoft.Bot.Builder.Azure. (Currently .NET only, coming soon to other languages)

    πŸ”„ Changelogs:

  • v4.9 Changes

    May 12, 2020

    May 2020 (version 4.9.0)

    πŸš€ Welcome to the May 2020 release of the Bot Framework SDK. There are a number of updates in this version that we hope you will like; some of the key highlights include:

    • πŸ— Skills - Skills now support adaptive dialogs and all activity types, and have improved support for SSO and OAuth. The v2.1 skill manifest is now GA. We also added Bot Framework Composer support for building and consuming Skills.
    • πŸ‘ Microsoft Teams - Improvements in Microsoft Teams API support, including support in Java!
    • πŸ”Š Bot Telemetry - Mapping of Dialogs into Azure AppInsights Page View Events.
    • Health Check APIs - Quickly verify a bot is running.
    • πŸ”Š Adaptive Dialogs - A more flexible, event driven dialog system for implementing multi-turn conversational patterns.
    • πŸ”€ CLI tools for Adaptive Dialogs - new ability to merge and validate adaptive schema assets.
    • Language Generation - Add language and personality responses to your bot conversations.
    • Adaptive Expressions - Use bot aware expressions to react to user input and drive bot functionality.
    • Authentication Improvements - SSO between Bots and Skills and improvements to X.509 auth.
    • 🍱 Generated Dialogs (Early Preview) - Automatically create robust Bot Framework Composer assets from JSON or JSON Schema that leverage Adaptive Dialogs.
    • πŸ”Š VS Code debugger for Adaptive Dialogs (Early Preview) - Create & validate .lu and .lg documents as well as debug declaratively defined adaptive dialogs.

    Insiders : Want to try new features as soon as possible? You can download the nightly Insiders build [C#] [JS] [Python] [CLI] and try the latest updates as soon as they are available. And for the latest Bot Framework news, updates, and content, follow us on Twitter @msbotframework!

    Skills

    ⚑️ Skills have been updated to work with adaptive dialogs, and both adaptive and traditional dialogs will now accept all types of activities.

    ⚑️ The skill manifest schema has been updated to version 2.1. Improvements in this version include the ability to declare & share your language models, and define any type of activity that your skill can receive.

    πŸš€ This release also includes authentication improvements with skills, including using SSO with dialogs, and OAuth without needing a magic code in WebChat and DirectLine.

    Microsoft Teams

    πŸš€ We continue to focus on making sure all the Teams-specific APIs are fully supported across our SDKs. This release brings full support for Microsoft Teams APIs in the preview Java SDK, including samples.

    ⚑️ The OnTeamsMemberAdded event in the activity handler has been updated to use the get single member endpoint under the covers, which should significantly reduce latency and reliability of this event in large teams.

    ⚑️ The TeamsChannelAccount object has been updated to include userRole (one of owner, member, or guest) and tenantId (for the user's tenantId).

    Bot Telemetry

    πŸ‘€ Bots now capture Page View events, native to Application Insights, whenever a dialog is started. This allows you to use the User Flows dashboard in Application Insights to see how users move through your bot, between dialogs and where they drop out.
    πŸ“„ Telemetry In AppInsights

    Health Check APIs

    πŸ‘Œ Support was added for a new invoke named healthCheck that allows a sender to verify if a bot is responding to requests, and if trust can be established between the sender and the bot. The bot also has the option of overriding the response to add additional health information in the response.

    πŸ”Š Adaptive Dialogs

    πŸš€ We’re also excited to make Adaptive Dialogs generally available in C# and as a preview release in JavaScript!

    ⚑️ Adaptive Dialogs, which underpin the dialog design and management authoring features found in Bot Framework Composer, enable developers to dynamically update conversation flow based on context and events. This is especially useful when dealing with more sophisticated conversation requirements, such as context switches and interruptions. Bot Framework Skills can now also leverage Adaptive Dialogs.

    πŸ”Š Adaptive Dialogs also now support Telemetry. Data from Adaptive Dialogs, including triggers, actions and recognizers now flow into your Azure Application Insights instance.

    πŸ”Š CLI tools for Adaptive Dialogs

    ⚑️ CLI tools for Adaptive Dialogs, Language Generation, QnaMaker and Luis Cross-train - new ability to merge and validate adaptive schema assets, augment qna and lu files, create/ update/ replace/ train/ publish LUIS and or QnA maker application and Language Generation templates manipulation.

    πŸ†• New CLI Tools were added for management of Adaptive Dialogs.

    • πŸ“¦ bf-dialog supports merging dialog schema files and verify file format correctness.
    • ⚑️ bf-luis Adds commands to augment lu files and create/ update/ replace/ train/ publish LUIS
    • ⚑️ bf-qnamaker Adds commands to augment qna files and create/ update/ replace/ train/ publish QnAMaker
    • πŸ“¦ bf-lg Parse, collate, expand and translate lg files.

    Language Generation

    LG is Generally Available (GA) on both the C# and JS Platforms.

    πŸ›° Language Generation (LG) enables you to define multiple variations of a phrase, execute simple expressions based on context, and refer to conversational memory. At the core of language generation lies template expansion and entity substitution. You can provide one-off variation for expansion as well as conditionally expanding a template. The output from language generation can be a simple text string or multi-line response or a complex object payload that a layer above language generation will use to construct a complete activity. The Bot Framework Composer natively supports language generation to produce output activities using the LG templating system.

    You can use Language Generation to:

    • Achieve a coherent personality, tone of voice for your bot.
    • Separate business logic from presentation.
    • Include variations and sophisticated composition for any of your bot's replies.
    • Construct cards, suggested actions and attachments using a structured response template.

    Language Generation is achieved through:

    • A markdown based .lg file that contains the templates and their composition.
      Full access to the current bot's memory so you can data bind language to the state of memory.
    • πŸ“œ Parser and runtime libraries that help achieve runtime resolution.

    Adaptive Expressions

    Adaptive Expressions are Generally Available (GA) on both the C# and JS Platforms.

    Bots use expressions to evaluate the outcome of a condition based on runtime information available in memory to the dialog or the Language Generation system. These evaluations determine how your bot reacts to user input and other factors that impact bot functionality.

    πŸ”Š Adaptive expressions were created to address this core need as well as provide an adaptive expression language that can used with the Bot Framework SDK and other conversational AI components, like Bot Framework Composer, Language Generation, Adaptive dialogs, and Adaptive Cards.

    πŸ‘ An adaptive expression can contain one or more explicit values, pre-built functions or [custom functions. Consumers of adaptive expressions also have the capability to inject additional supported functions. For example, all Language Generation templates are available as functions as well as additional functions that are only available within that component's use of adaptive expressions.

    Authentication Improvements

    πŸ‘ We added support for single sign-on while using Expect Replies. This applies to SSO performed between a pair of bots: host and a skill.

    For Bot Identification we've added the ability to specify sendx5c parameter for certificate authentication. This feature was requested by customers and allows for more flexibility when using cert auth.

    βž• Additional Sovereign Clouds are supported.

    πŸ”Š Generated Dialogs - Early Preview

    πŸ— The Bot Framework has a rich collection of conversational building blocks, but
    creating a bot that feels natural to converse with requires understanding and
    coordinating across language understanding, language generation and dialog
    management. To simplify this process and capture best practices, we've created
    πŸ”Œ the bf-generate plugin for the BotFramework CLI tool. The
    πŸ”Š generated dialogs make use of event-driven adaptive dialogs with a rich and
    evolving set of capabilities including:

    • πŸ– Handle out of order and multiple responses for simple and array properties.
    • βž• Add, remove, clear and show properties.
    • πŸ‘Œ Support for choosing between ambiguous entity values and entity property mappings.
    • Recognizing and mapping for all LUIS prebuilt entities.
    • Help function, including auto-help on multiple retries.
    • Cancel
    • Confirmation

    VS Code Debugger - Early Preview

    πŸ”Š Adaptive tools is a brand new Visual studio code extension you can use to create/ validate .lu and .lg documents as well as debug declaratively defined adaptive dialogs. This extension provides rich authoring & editing capabilities for .lu and .lg file formats including syntax highlighting, auto-suggest and auto-complete.

    πŸš€ We anticipate adding an early preview to the VS Marketplace shortly after this release.

    πŸ— Bot Builder Community

    πŸš€ During this release, the Bot Builder Community has further raised the bar by adding more features, more adapters, and fixing more bugs.

    πŸ— A revised C# Alexa Adapter and Google Home Adapter Re-built from the ground up, starting with Alexa, to allow the adapters to be consumed by Azure Bot Service and made available as channels. Improvements include better native activity type mapping, improved markdown rendering and support for more complex scenarios (such as merging multiple outgoing activities).

    πŸ— A new C# Zoom Adapter. Currently supports Zoom 1:1 and channel chat capabilities, being converted to native BF activity types. Also supports the subscribing to any event a Zoom as supports (translated into Event activities), with full support for Zoom interactive messages and rich message templates.

    πŸ— A RingCentral Adapter. The RingCentral Engage adapter allows you to add an additional endpoint to your bot for RingCentral Engage Digital Platform integration. The RingCentral endpoint can be used in conjunction with other channels meaning, for example, you can have a bot exposed on out of the box channels such as Facebook and Teams, but also integrated as an RingCentral Engage Digital Source SDK into RingCentral.

  • v3.16.1.40077_BotBuilder

    September 23, 2018
  • v3.16.1.38906_BotBuilder

    September 06, 2018
  • v3.16.1.38846_BotBuilder

    September 05, 2018
  • v3.16.1.38846 Changes

    September 06, 2018
    • πŸ›  Fix for 401 errors on refresh token
    • πŸ›  Fix for ObjectDisposed Exception
  • v3.16.1.38843_BotBuilder

    September 05, 2018
  • v3.16.1.38820_BotBuilder

    September 05, 2018
  • v3.16.0.38376_BotBuilder

    August 25, 2018