Visual Studio Code extensions for Bot Framework devs

Motivation#

As a Bot Framework enthusiast, I was looking for ways how to speed up routines in my daily tasks. Therefore I decided to publish some nice little helpers together with my friends from the Bot Framework Community to speed up tasks when working on a bot a bit. And this is what we currently published:

All Visual Studio Code snippets can be downloaded from here .

All Visual Studio Code commands can be downloaded from here .

Snippets#

Currently we have snippets available for the following categories:

• Bot Framework Web Chat
• LUIS (.lu) files
• Adaptive Cards

Create a basic Web Chat HTML file structure - bf-wc-create-basic-hml#

The snippet bf-wc-create-basic-hml creates a basic plain html/js web chat within an HTML file:

Create a Web Chat HTML file structure with advanced styling - bf-wc-create-style-html#

The snippet bf-wc-create-style-html creates a plain html/js web chat within an HTML file including some styling options already added to the web chat:

Create a sample Language Understanding (.lu) file - bfc-lu-create#

The snippet bfc-lu-create creates a the required structure within .lu files used for managing LUIS applications:

Create a sample Adaptive Card “Activity Update” - bf-ac-activityUpdate#

Adds a activity update sample card to your project.

Create a sample Adaptive Card “Input Form” - bf-ac-inputForm#

Initializes a new input form sample card to be used to gather input from users.

Create a sample Adaptive Card “Weather Compact” - bf-ac-weatherCompact#

Creates the weather compact sample card to demo a weather card.

Create a sample Adaptive Card “Expense Report” - bf-ac-expenseReport#

Provides you with the expense report sample card to include in your bot’s project.

Commands#

At the moment we published one command which lets you import a new LUIS app usign the Bot Framework CLI from a .lu file (which you could create with our snippets) to make the LUIS deployment process far easier. It can be done like this:

All you need to do is to create a .lu file and populate it and then right-click it from the explorer view and select Import LUIS application fill out the details and the command will create a new LUIS application for you!

If you have any ideas or feeback, please feel free to share it here or do a PR 😎