Microsoft Agent Framework
The latest news from the Microsoft Agent Framework team for developers
Latest posts
Meet your agent harness and claw
Part 1 of Build your own claw and agent harness with Microsoft Agent Framework. In the overview we said a "claw" is really just an agent harness: a loop around a model, wired up with tools, planning, memory, and more. In this first post we stand up that loop and give our personal finance assistant its first three abilities: plan. The remarkable part: we get almost all of this for free. Agent Framework's harness bundles function invocation, history persistence, planning, and web search into a single call. We only supply what makes our agent ours - its instructions and its custom tool. Let...
Build your own claw and agent harness with Microsoft Agent Framework
What does it take to build your own "claw" - a capable, CLI-style agent that can plan, use tools, remember things, and safely act on your behalf? Coding agents and assistants like these can feel like magic, but underneath they are an agent harness: a loop around a language model wired up with tools, planning, memory, approvals, and observability. In this series we build one from scratch using Microsoft Agent Framework and its batteries-included harness, demonstrating both .NET and Python, side by side. A claw is just a harness Strip away the UI and a coding agent is a model plus a harness that gives it: ...
ICYMI: Inside the Microsoft Agent Framework: How we designed a layered SDK
In case you missed it, the Command Line blog was launched last week and has a great article (by yours truly) about our SDK design philosophy with Microsoft Agent Framework. Check it out: Inside the Microsoft Agent Framework: How we designed a layered SDK Developers are moving quickly from simple chat-based AI experiences to applications that can reason, use tools, coordinate across systems, and complete multi-step and long-running tasks. The first wave of AI apps proved that large language models could understand intent and generate content through patterns like completions, retrieval-augmented g...
Microsoft Agent Framework at BUILD 2026: Agent Harness, Hosted Agents, CodeAct, and more
Microsoft Agent Framework at BUILD 2026: Agent Harness, Hosted Agents, CodeAct, and more BUILD 2026 is underway, and the Microsoft Agent Framework team have a round-up of exciting announcements! Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) is our open-source SDK and runtime for building AI agents and multi-agent workflows, with the same concepts and APIs across .NET and Python. It gives you a clean programming model - chat clients, tools, MCP integrations, context providers, middleware, and multi-step workflows - so you can focus on agent logic instead of plumbing. MAF reached 1.0 GA on April 2, 2026, bringing the conver...
Microsoft Agent Framework at BUILD 2026
BUILD 2026 begins on Tuesday, June 2, and there will be tons of exciting announcements from the Microsoft Agent Framework team, Microsoft Foundry, and all things Microsoft AI. If you're traveling to San Francisco for BUILD, be sure to stop by the Microsoft Foundry booths to chat with folks from the Agent Framework team - there'll be stickers! If you can't make it to SF, you can still register online and check out the great sessions: Register for Microsoft Build Looking for sessions with Microsoft Agent Framework to watch online? Start with these breakout sessions. Times are shown in Pacific time; ch...
Agent Skills for Python: File, Code, and Class – Composed in One Provider
Python developers working with Agent Skills can now author skills as files on disk, as inline Python code, or as reusable classes - and mix them freely through composable source classes that handle discovery, filtering, and deduplication. A skill living in your local repository, one installed from your organization's internal package index, and a quick inline bridge you wrote ten minutes ago all plug into the same provider. This is the third post in our Agent Skills series. The first post introduced file-based skills; the second added code-defined skills, script execution, and approval for Python. This post wa...
Stop prompt injection from hijacking your agent, new security capabilities now released within Agent Framework
Prompt injection is the #1 risk on the OWASP LLM Top 10, and most agents in production today defend against it with one of two heuristics: a defensive system prompt, or a hand-rolled allowlist. Neither is deterministic. Both fail silently the day someone slips a line into an issue body, an email, or a tool result. With FIDES (Flow Integrity Deterministic Enforcement System) in Agent Framework, your agent gets information-flow control as a first-class middleware: every piece of content carries an integrity label (trusted/untrusted) and a confidentiality label (public/private), labels propagate automatica...
Governance at the Speed of Agents: Microsoft Agent Framework and Agent Governance Toolkit, Better Together
Building powerful AI agents is only half the story, running them safely in production is the real challenge. As customers adopt Microsoft Agent Framework for agent orchestration, a clear need has emerged for robust, built-in governance. In this post, Imran Siddique from the AGT team walks through how Agent Governance Toolkit pairs with Agent Framework to enforce policy at runtime, govern agent actions, and provide end-to-end auditability. Turning agentic systems into production-ready platforms. The Complete Stack for Production AI Agents Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 provides everything teams need to build, orc...
A Tour of Handoff Orchestration Pattern
A Tour of the Handoff Orchestration Pattern Most multi-agent systems start out simple: a router agent receives a user request, picks the right specialist, and forwards the conversation. As long as each specialist can complete its task in one pass, that model works fine. The first time it breaks is when an agent needs more: a follow-up question for the user, additional context from another specialist, or a realization mid-turn that the request belongs somewhere else entirely. At that point, a fixed pipeline or one-shot router isn’t enough. What you need is a small, bounded graph where agents themselves decid...