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microsoft / botframework-sdk

Bot Framework provides the most comprehensive experience for building conversation applications.
MIT License
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Is the Bot Framework still in active Development? (stackoverflow closes these questions) #6584

Closed Godrules500 closed 1 year ago

Godrules500 commented 1 year ago

I tried going to stack overflow, but the questions like this just get closed so I don't know where else to ask this. I see that version 4 came out in 2021, but in 2 years there hasn't been a new major release which is a little odd for an active project.

Is there a version 5 planned, or is this project mostly dead? Is the recommendation to go with Power Virtual Agent instead, or is this still a great and active tool to use?

Thanks! I know this is against the "issue" rule, but I just don't know how else to ask. If there is another way to get appropriate feedback, please let me know.

Again, thanks!

NebulusIO commented 1 year ago

I would like to know this too.

anishprasad01 commented 1 year ago

We’ve been working for the last year to bring the capabilities of Bot Framework to Power Virtual Agents (PVA) customers; the first round of which are available now through the Power Virtual Agents public preview with the integrated authoring canvas. PVA makes authoring even easier than Composer and takes care of the mechanics of operating bots & infrastructure for the customer. As PVA becomes more and more capable we hope everyone starts to use PVA for their chatbot building needs.

The only retirements on the Bot Framework side have been the Java and Python SDKs. The Bot Framework Composer & C# .NET/Node.js SDKs are fully supported and have not been retired. However, we would expect to see new capabilities introduced via Power Virtual Agents and its integrations vs Bot Framework going forward.

Godrules500 commented 1 year ago

Thank you for your response @anishprasad01 ! If the bot framework sdk is going to be slowly made obsolete, what happens in situations where PVA cannot do certain things a developer could do within code and the bot framework SDK could do? Is the expectation that we create APIs that return data, and then let PVA handle that data instead of the SDK managing the dialog?

NebulusIO commented 1 year ago

@Godrules500 I looked into this and it seems like we might need to convert the data from JSON using Power Virtual Agents (PVA). We can set up a Call to Action in PVA that points to a Power Automate Flow. From there, the flow can use connectors to work with Power Fx, Azure Functions, or some other API.

See below for the Record type. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/power-fx/data-types