A fundamental reason to use a framework to write a chat bot is so you don’t need to do it all yourself, specially, do it all over again if you want your bot running on a new channel.

However, once in a while, you might find yourself needing to do something very specific to a particular channel, maybe you want to get that receipt template rendered just the way you want to, or maybe you want to use a native functionality of Skype - whatever it might be, here’s how you could do it, when using Bot Framework.

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Microsoft’s Bot Framework is a set of libraries (you can choose between C# and JavaScript) and services that let you author chat bots for different platforms, like Facebook’s Messenger, Skype, What’sApp and others - based on the premise that most the code you write can be shared between those different targets.

On the C# side, one limitation, until recently, was that you could only run it on ASP.NET. That’s in the past now. Recently a pull request sent by Yegor and I to, add support to ASP.NET Core, was merged into the BotFramework’s develop branch!

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