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I think it's about time to talk about botframework generator I wrote around Jan this year (2017). since April, 2016 I'm fascinated by what Microsoft's botframework can do.  I wrote a three part blog post- describing in details how to build an office assistant utilizing both Microsoft botframework and LUIS (language understanding intelligent services), for more details have a look here.

Earlier this year I was trying to speed up the scaffolding process of bot development using botframework and to be more precise I was focusing on the nodejs version of the sdk. In a day or so I ended up building a basic Yeoman generator that generates three types of sample bots which similar to the same choices you will get using the azure bot service.

The generator is not a very sophisticated one, in a matter of fact it's a very basic "attempt" so far and I to start adding more templates. One template I think about is a bot that is Office365-aware bot.

The node package is published almost 7 months ago @ https://www.npmjs.com/package/generator-botframework and it can be installed using


After the installation what you really need is to create a new directory and run the following command


Then you will be guided through simple steps to generate the skeleton of your bot, it will first ask you to specify the name of the bot then the author
Then you will have to provide the location of the generated files.

after that, here comes the main decision which type of bot you want, which is one of three templates, for simplicity we will choose an echo bot which is basically reply back exactly the user's message.

 After the generator is done with generating the seed of your bot you can either update it add your own logic and make it more than just basic skeleton or you can easily choose to run the generated code and connect to it using the emulator and start playing around with it. If you choose to run it this what exactly you will get.


The end-to-end process will take less than 3 minutes to install, generate and run your bot. I'm currently in the process to add more templates to the generator , any contribution is very appreciated
code can be found at https://github.com/ministainer/generator-botframework