Building Your First Bot

Before proceeding further, I recommend you read my first article: Getting Started with Microsoft Bot Framework.

Once you are done with creating the project as you can see there is an API Controller in Controllers folder named “MessageController”.

[BotAuthentication]
public class MessagesController: ApiController
{
    /// <summary>
    /// POST: api/Messages
    /// Receive a message from a user and reply to it
    /// </summary>
    public async Task < Message > Post([FromBody] Message message)
    {
        if (message.Type == "Message")
        {
            // calculate something for us to return
            int length = (message.Text ? ? string.Empty).Length;
            // return our reply to the user
            return message.CreateReplyMessage($ "You sent {length} characters");
        }
        else
        {
            return HandleSystemMessage(message);
        }
    }
}

I am changing text a little bit and my message will look like this.

/// <summary>
/// POST: api/Messages
/// Receive a message from a user and reply to it
/// </summary>
public async Task < Message > Post([FromBody] Message message)
{
    if (message.Type == "Message")
    {
        // return our reply to the user
        return message.CreateReplyMessage($ "Raj said:{message.Text}");
    }
    else
    {
        return HandleSystemMessage(message);
    }
}

Run your application,

If you want to run on emulator to test your calls, Install emulator form here.

Pass three things when you run Bot Emulator.

• URL - You have to mention your application url with port before api/messages.
• AppId - Defined in web.config
• AppSecret - Defined in web.config

Conclusion

In this article, we have learned how to create a bot using Microsoft Bot Framework. In next article we will see how to publish your Bot Application to Microsoft Azure. If you have any question or comments, message me on C# Corner comments section.

Next article: How to publish your bot to Microsoft Azure