Having a botframework chatbot up and running and responding to user messages is one thing, but how can you send a new message to bring the user back into the conversation if they haven’t just sent a new message for you to reply to?
The botframework documentation and other tutorials will point you towards using Azure Functions and the new ActivityType.Trigger to handle this which, although being a great use case for Azure Functions, make the underlying implementation harder to understand. It also means you couldn’t easily implement this on AWS, for example.
In this article I’ll show you how to easily implement Proactive Botframework Messaging just using BotFramework fundamentals.