Develop Reference

MS Teams outgoing webhook application

I have built a bot in Visual Studio using C#, which I have registered with the Bot framework. Its a test bot at the moment, which merely scans the incoming text and returns a message on how many characters are in the message. However, what I want to do is to hook this bot up to a Teams channel and use some sort of trigger (similar to slash commands in Slack) and then take the text from the message and send that to my bot, which will then run some code to forward that data on to an external URL, which would then reply back to the bot and then forward that data into the Teams channel. Does anyone know if something like this is possible? At the least all I need to know is whether I can get some functionality similar to slash commands in Slack, which I can then work with and get the desired outcome from this bot.

Firstly, the issue with Microsoft Teams bots that you either need to talk to them in 101 or mentioned them in a group conversation.
Secondly, the Slack-like commands are not supported and you need to understand the intent of a person. You can use buttons on cards instead.
It can be done in a few ways. The main idea is the following.
Bot: Hello, my name is Pradeep Patel. You can use me like "#pradeep launch ", where what is a parameter for launch command.
User: #pradeep launch rocket
Bot: User, the rocket has been launched.
User: #pradeep try jump
Bot: Sorry, I don't have the command "try" implemented. Please type "help" to find out more information.
You can use multiple tools to recognize intents:
RegEx
Google Api.ai
Microsoft LUIS

Getting the chat ID from call ID with the Skype API

I'm writing a simple conference host in C# for the Skype API. When the program is notified that a call has ended, I want it to send the "/golive" command to the group chat associated with the call that just ended. I can do everything except retrieve the chat ID from the call, or even vice versa.
It appears from the API documentation, that there is no link between the chat and the call, but this makes no sense as you can only have one call per chat, and Skype gives you a "join call" button at the top of the chat, so Skype MUST link between the Chat and the call. Any ideas how to get at that information?

go to the group chat profile, copy conversation link -> it will look like skype?chat&blob=
delete that part then the api command is CHAT CREATEUSINGBLOB
after that you get a #thisisyourchatid and you just chat to that address (including the #)

In addition to previous answer you can use "/get uri" or "/get blob" chat command in a group chat to get blob.

Identify if an email address is 'public'

I would like to identify if an email address comes from a public provider or is from an established business. I consider public email addresses to be things such as:
Open email service providers, such as
gmail, hotmail and yahoo.
Anonymization services, such as mailinator or dispostable.
I'm aware that there is no foolproof way to do this, and obviously any list based solution would require constant updates.
Is there a public listing or .NET library that can do this for me?

Are there really that many free webmail providers out there? I would go with a 'blacklisting' style solution.
For example, flag everything in this wikipedia list as free (heck I would think covering gmail/hotmail/yahoo/aol would cover a huge % of users anyway). Then if you get more than 2 (or higher number if your site has high throughput) registrations from the same email domain, it notifies the admin to check the domain to see if it needs to be added to the 'blacklist'.
I would imagine there are much more reliable ways to detect business customers though. For example in Australia you could just ask for an ABN and then check that it's valid. Are you willing to punish small business who don't have email providing and just use a generic #gmail account?

Here is a link to SpamAssasin's freemail list: http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/spamassassin/trunk/rules/20_freemail_domains.cf.
I suppose, checking against this list is a good start.

You might want to talk to the Better-Business-Bureau ( http://www.bbb.org ) and see if they provide some kind of a feed or API. I had a quick look at their site and couldn't see anything obvious, but it would be this kind of organisation I would head to first if I wanted to find out domain names belonging to established businesses. They do have a form on their site to search by email address ( http://www.bbb.org/us/Find-Business-Reviews/ )

Consider using HubSpot blocked domains list. It is not a guarantee that it is 100% accurate or complete.
They also provide a CSV file that you can download and parse programmatically. Link to CSV file is in the linked page.

I am guessing the ultimate goal is to clean your database from unwanted contacts that will increase the monthly bill. What you can do is the following:
Create a webhook that is triggered whenever a new contact is added.
In that webhook (which can be written in any language), check if the contact is in a blacklist (which is gmail/etc...).
Remove the contact if it is in a blacklist using an API call (you will need to first get the contact ID, which can be easily retrieved using API).

Sendgrid Emails - Result handling and tracking

I am looking at the c# .Net libraries from sendgrid to send emails from my applications. I can only see a DeliverAsync method within Web and I don't see any Deliver method as shown in some examples..
1) if I want to know the result of that email(success/Failed/smtp status codes), How and where do I get that information? Is there any result object?
2) if I want to track the status of the email later like whether it sent to spam or user opened it How can I do that. DO they have any tracking number/id for the email which I can get from the result object and use it later to get status through their API?
I am new to using Sendgrid libraries. So any help is appreciated.
Thanks

There's no result object in the sending of the message, since that can take some time.
The best way is to leverage the Event Webhook, so that you can receive POSTs with JSON data about your messages. you can even leverage unique_args to positively relate events to a particular message.

Depending on what you want to do, you might want to try a templating API, like sendwithus. They'll integrate with SendGrid events for you and give a UI showing events and status of every email.

How to send MMS with C#

I need to send MMS thought a C# application. I have already found 2 interesting components:
http://www.winwap.com
http://www.nowsms.com
Does anyone have experience with other third party components?
Could someone explain what kind of server I need to send those MMS? Is it a classic SMTP Server?

Typically I have always done this using a 3rd party aggregator. The messages are compiled into SMIL, which is the description language for the MMS messages. These are then sent on to the aggregator who will then send them through the MMS gateway of the Network Operator. They are typically charged on a per message basis and the aggregators will buy the messages in a block from the operators.
If you are trying to send an MMS message without getting charged then I am not sure how to do this, or if it is possible.

You could do it yourself. Some MMS companies just have a SOAP API that you can call. All you need to do is construct the XML and send it off via a URL. I have done this once before, but can't remember the name of the company I used.

This post earlier discussed different approaches for SMS and might be helpful for you.

You could use Twilio to accomplish this. You can dive into the docs for specific implementation details but using the C# helper library the code to send an MMS would look like this:
// Send a new outgoing MMS by POSTing to the Messages resource */
client.SendMessage(
"YYY-YYY-YYYY", // From number, must be an SMS-enabled Twilio number
person.Key, // To number, if using Sandbox see note above
// message content
string.Format("Hey {0}, Monkey Party at 6PM. Bring Bananas!", person.Value),
// media url of the image
new string[] {"https://demo.twilio.com/owl.png" }
);
Disclaimer: I work for Twilio.