Microsoft has released Teams from one year, the utility of this product is indisputable, a strength is definitely the possibility to extend it with bots, connectors and tabs. In this article, I’ll talk about how to build a bot and how to leverage the Microsoft Teams API capabilities, which are the following:

• Fetch Channel List
• Mention User
• Start New 1 on 1 Chat
• Route Message To General
• Fetch Member List
• Send O365 Card
• Fetch Team Info
• Start New Reply Chain
• Mention Channel
• Mention Team
• Notification Feed
• Bot Delete Message

Let’s start to create a bot, the easiest way is create a “Web App Bot” on Azure, this naturally presupposes the possession of a subscription:

The next step is to download the package, you can do it by clicking on “Build” under “Bot Management” and then “Download zip file”:

Unzip the content in a folder and open it with Visual Studio Code or other code editors, in my case I’ll use VSCode. In order to debug the bot locally is required ngrok a “secure introspectable tunnels to localhost webhook development tool and debugging tool”, then on VSCode create a folder “.vscode” and a file “launch.json” as follow:

The content of the file “launch.json” is:

{
    // Use IntelliSense to learn about possible attributes.
    // Hover to view descriptions of existing attributes.
    // For more information, visit: https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=830387
    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "type": "node",
            "request": "launch",
            "name": "Launch Program",
            "program": "${workspaceFolder}\\app.js",
            "env": {
                "MicrosoftAppId": "<App ID>",
                "MicrosoftAppPassword": "<App Password>",
                "AzureWebJobsStorage": "<Connection string available on Azure>"
            }
        }
    ]
}

This allows running the VSCode debugger. When you are ready to debug your bot run the console command “ngrok http 3978” and copy the https URL:

Open the “Settings” of your bot on Azure and paste the ngrok https URL in the field “Messaging endpoint”, at the end will be something like that https://ngrokurl/api/messages in this way your bot will respond directly from your local machine. The last step is set up the breakpoints and click on play:

Open Teams and start a new chat, in the field to: write the Microsoft App Id that you can read on Azure in “Application Settings” this allow you to start a one to one conversation with your bot. I developed a sample that you can find on my Github which makes use of Microsoft Teams API check the images below:

The solution is available on Github: https://github.com/giuleon/teams-bot-api