November 2020 (version 4.11.0)
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:
- 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.
- Composer Continued improvements in deployment, Skills integration, features flags, and more!
- Orchestrator (preview) Improved samples, models, and Bot Framework Composer support
- Bot Framework Documentation We've added Adaptive Dialog support, updated docs around Adaptive Expressions, and custom .lg functions.
- CLI Improvements to merging and importing of dialogs and assets
- Virtual Assistant Improved core runtime, advancements in skills features
- Power Virtual Agents Thanks to the Bot Framework SDK, it is easier and easier to build a PVA Bot!
- 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
- CacheInfo support on Invoke responses
- OAuthInput fix
- Meeting specific notification support
- Add on_teams_team_renamed (python only)
Skills
To reduce development friction, you can now run and test skills locally with the Emulator without needing an AppId and password.
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
Code quality and testing infrastructure have continued to be a focus for the this SDK release.
- The default branch on all repositories has been renamed to 'main'.
- We have improved typing and transcript logger middleware behavior and error handling.
- Dotnet SDK tests have been ported to xunit.
- Configurable Adaptive Dialog cycle detection.
- Form Dialog preview
Documentation
Updates and improvements to existing documentation have continued.
- 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.
- Added Java (preview) reference documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/java/api/?term=microsoft.bot.builder
- Added information on how to use the Bot Framework CLI commands in support of various adaptive dialog features.
- 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.
- 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)
The Cloud Adapter introduces an enriched configuration model and enables hosting a bot in any cloud environment.
- Supports the Bot Framework protocol and auth model.
- 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 (“dispatch”) 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.
- 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.
This is a preview release with improved documentation and language models.
CLI
- The CLI will now download an merge dialog assets.
- Ordering of names while merging.
- Expose import resolver interface for cross-train/luis:build/qnamaker:build
- Region support in lg translate
Virtual Assistant
- Skills improvements
- Core runtime design updates
Composer
- Please see the detailed Bot Framework Composer release notes
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
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.
- 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).
4.11.0 Change Logs
Change log for Python 4.11.0
- Add conditional on push to coveralls task to avoid forks [PR 1420]
- Update token validation issues [PR 1419]
- Teams: Add on_teams_team_renamed [PR 1418]
- Teams CacheInfo [PR 1417]
- Teams: Get Participant meeting API [PR 1411]
- Skills: support update and delete activities [PR 1413]
- TranscriptLogger should not log continue conversation [PR 1415]
- Teams: Meeting notification [PR 1403]
- Skills: local testing with no appId or password [PR 1406]
- Skills: return ResourceResponse when forwarding activities [PR 1404]
- Teams: add InstallationUpdate sub events [PR 1368]
- Skills: add EndOfConversationCodes to EndOfConversation activity from Skill [PR 1402]
- Skills: do not send typing activity from skills [PR 1399]
- Skills: add tests for SkillHttpClient [PR 1401]
- Skills: skill dialog delete conversation id on EndOfConversation [PR 1395]
- Revert "Fixed Recognizer on empty utterance" [PR 1397]
- Fixes for malformed reference comments [PR 1381]
- Fixed Recognizer on empty utterance [PR 1387]
- Skills: add SkillValidation Claims tests [PR 1383]
- Black version updated in pipeline [PR 1382]
- Allow requests module as QnAMaker's HTTP client [PR 1369]
- Link updates for master rename [PR 1366]
- GitHub issue template updates [PR 1350]