Microsoft Bot Framework on ASP.NET Core
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!
They released the changes on the 3.6.0-alpha version. Here’s the breakdown:
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The Microsoft.Bot.Builder package remains targeting ASP.NET only, for backward compatibility.
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Microsoft.Bot.Builder.Common is the framework-independent Bot.Builder, i.e. without any dependencies on the any particular connector implementation
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When using Bot.Builder.Common, you can choose to install the ASP.NET Core connector package or stick with the ASP.NET connector
Unfortunately, Microsoft.Bot.Builder.Common still targets .NET Framework, so you cannot run it on other platforms. However, Microsoft.Bot.Connector.AspNetCore targets .NET Standard 1.4, so if you don’t use the Builder, you can run your bot service on Mac or Linux as well, using .NETCore!.
