Microsoft Agent Framework (Preview): Making AI Agents Simple for Every Developer (devblogs.microsoft.com)

Microsoft announced the preview of the Microsoft Agent Framework, a set of .NET libraries that make building, orchestrating, hosting, and observing AI agents far simpler for developers. Targeted at teams that otherwise spend weeks wiring orchestration, tool access, and hosting, the framework provides high-level abstractions (AIAgent, ChatClientAgent) and ready-made patterns so a working agent can be created in minutes. It’s significant because it standardizes agent development for the .NET ecosystem, lowers boilerplate, and enables rapid composition of multi-agent workflows—useful for content pipelines, research stacks, customer service flows, and more. Technically, the framework builds on Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, and Microsoft.Extensions.AI and exposes IChatClient to make model providers interchangeable (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, GitHub-hosted models, Foundry Local, Ollama, etc.). It supports sequential, concurrent, handoff and group-chat workflow patterns, an AgentWorkflowBuilder to compose agents into single-capability endpoints, and easy tool integration via AIFunctionFactory and Model Context Protocol (MCP) clients for databases, web search, or hosted tools like code interpreters. Hosting integrates with familiar .NET patterns (Minimal Web API, ASP.NET) and includes monitoring/observability hooks. A quickstart uses .NET 9 and a GitHub PAT for hosted models; packages are available as prerelease NuGet. The result is a pragmatic, extensible platform for moving from prototype to production with multi-agent AI systems.