March 2021 (version 4.12.0)

Welcome to the March 2021 release of the Bot Framework SDK.

• Telephony Bot Framework Telephony channel is now available with samples in early preview.

• Teams New and improved samples, Adaptive Card Tabs, Action.Execute (preview, C#) and Composer support (preview).

• Cloud Adapter Cloud Adapter (preview 2, C#) has improved platform support with increased functionality.

• Orchestrator Orchestrator (preview 3) now supports more languages, and documentation has been improved.

• CLI Bot Framework CLI Tools LUIS applications neural training technology support, and more!

• Azure Health Bot Microsoft Healthcare Bot service is moving to Azure, further empowering organizations to benefit from Azure’s enhanced tooling, security, and compliance offerings.

• Power Virtual Agents PVA Bot creation, editing and publishing made easy!

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!

Telephony (preview)

The Telephony channel is a channel in Microsoft Bot Framework that enables a bot to interact with users over the phone. It leverages the power of Microsoft Bot Framework combined with the Azure Communication Services and the Azure Speech Services.

Note: Telephony Channel is currently in Public Preview, available broadly for the US-based Azure subscriptions. Get started building a Telephony Bot today: Botframework-Telephony

Cloud Adapter (C# only, preview 2)

• Platform alignment improved with HttpClientFactory
• User authentication improvements with UserTokenClient
• Streaming protocol support integrated into Cloud Adapter
• TurnContext, TurnState and ConnectorClient object lifetime is now properly handled by the SDK, disposing these objects after they are out of scope.
• Cloud Adapter has been deprecated from WebApi

Microsoft Teams

• Adaptive Card Tabs with samples
• Adaptive Dialog responses with new Teams triggers and Actions (preview), available in the C# and JavaScript SDKs as well as the Composer nightly.
• New and improved samples.

Bot Framework CLI Tools

• Added support for LUIS applications neural training technology.
• Enhancements and fixes to LU Parser to support special characters and name duplication on Intents and features.
• Enable direct version publish in luis:build.

Orchestrator (preview 3)

Orchestrator recognizer has been updated for preview 3 as follows:
• Improved language recognition models and samples
• New multilingual models for New multilingual models for Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.
• Updated CLI with support for dispatch migration scenarios.
• Improved support of Composer scenarios.
• Support for 32bit windows for limited scenarios. For production you must use 64bit.
• Updated documentation

Adaptive Cards Invoke (preview, C# sdk only)

• Support for Adaptive Cards Action.Execute is now available in the C# sdk.
• See also Universal Bot

Bug fixes and improvements

• Add DialogManager support in python sdk
• Fix DialogManager does not return EoC code when a dialog ends
• Fixes in dotnet streaming library
• Localization fixes and improved support for Composer scenarios

Composer

• Please see the detailed Bot Framework Composer release notes

Azure Health Bot

The Health Bot Service is a cloud platform for developers, built on top of Microsoft Azure and uses Bot Framework under the hood. Health Bot Overview.

Introducing Azure Health Bot—an evolution of Microsoft Healthcare Bot with new functionality
by Lili Cheng Corporate Vice President, Conversational AI

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, Power Virtual Agents support for Teams channel Single Sign-on is available in preview.

PVA Teams SSO—Public Preview
by Cleber Mori Senior Program Manager, Power Virtual Agents

Change log for Python 4.12.0

• Fixes dialog exporting memory module [1539]
• Add TabEntityContext to init.py [1538]
• Update azure blob SDK version [1515]
• Open id metadata cache refresh if key is missing [1487]
• Reduce trace activity in dialogs [1488]
• Adding tab response [1537]
• Adaptive Card Tabs [1486]
• Bump cryptography from 3.2 to 3.3.2 in /libraries/botframework-connector [PR 1511]
• Bump cryptography from 3.2 to 3.3.2 in /libraries/botbuilder-core [PR 1512]
• Bump cryptography from 3.2 to 3.3.2 in /libraries/botbuilder-dialogs [PR 1513]
• DialogContainer.telemetryclient [PR 1523]
• updated twitter account [PR 1518]
• Limiting yarl dependency version to be compatible with python 3.7 (when min version suported >= 3.8 this constraint can be removed) [PR 1507]
• Updated dialog_manager to send EoC code like dialog_extensions. [PR 1504]
• pylance warnings corrections for List arguments [PR 1491]
• [#631][PORT] [Slack Adapters] Add Slack Functional Test [PR 1432]
• DialogManager [PR 1409]
• Adding add-upgrade and remove-upgrade activity types in ActivityHandler [PR 1476]
• (py) Remove comments pertaining to auto-generation in Schema and Connector [PR 1464]
• Updating msal dependency [PR 1451]
• [PORT] Update channel.py to make it clear that Telegram supports card actions [PR 1437]
• ActivityHandler inheriting from Bot [PR 1443]
• [#1218] [PORT] Emit better error messages for all dialogs [PR 1433]
• Add OR Operation to QnAMaker GenerateAnswer for StrictFilter Behavioral Option [PR 1429]
• feat: create parity issue workflow [PR 1439]
• Bump cryptography from 2.8.0 to 3.2 in /libraries/botframework-connector [PR 1424]
• Bump cryptography from 2.8.0 to 3.2 in /libraries/botbuilder-core [PR 1425]
• Bump cryptography from 2.8 to 3.2 in /libraries/botbuilder-dialogs [PR 1426]
• Only reassign waterfall step name only if the step doesn't have a name [PR 1431]
• Version bump to 4.12.0 [PR 1422]
• Issue 1428 fix [PR 1435]
• Invoke with expected replies [PR 1427]
• Add conditional on push to coveralls task to avoid forks [PR 1420]