MAF / .NET

Draft · work in progress

Microsoft Agent Framework for .NET Engineers

Agents, tools, MCP, graph workflows, orchestration and observability on the 1.0 GA foundation. Written for engineers who have shipped ASP.NET Core services and are now being asked to put an agent into production.

This book will be wrong within a quarter, and it says so in the introduction. The framework ships on several release trains at once, and names have changed between preview and GA. Every listing transcribed from documentation rather than compiled carries a visible compile before you trust this marker, and the count is published on every build.

Download the PDF Read the source

Pinned versions

The framework publishes roughly three dozen packages moving in separate release trains. A single version property does not work. This is the snapshot the book is written against.

appendix a — package reference verified july 2026
Microsoft.Agents.AI · .OpenAI · .Workflows 1.10.0 stable
Workflows.Generators · Workflows.Declarative 1.10.0 stable
Harness · Hyperlight · DurableTask · Foundry.Hosting 1.6.2 preview
ModelContextProtocol 1.4.0 stable
Microsoft.Agents.AI.AzureAI 1.0.0-rc5 stranded

Contents

Four parts, all twelve chapters and four appendices drafted — 236 pages. What remains is finishing rather than drafting: two specified experiments not yet run, the screenshots, and the listings still marked compile before you trust this.

I · Foundations

  1. 1The Landscape
  2. 2Your First Agent
  3. 3Tools, MCP and Skills
  4. 4Memory, Context and State

II · Workflows

  1. 5Executors and Edges
  2. 6Durability and Control
  3. 7Multi-Agent Orchestration

III · Production

  1. 8Middleware and Observability
  2. 9Evaluation
  3. 10Hosting, Durability and A2A
  4. 11The Agent Harness

IV · Capstone & appendices

  1. 12Capstone
  2. APackages and Versions
  3. BProvider Matrix
  4. CTroubleshooting
  5. DScreenshot Manifest

How it is built

The book is LaTeX. Nothing is hand-assembled, so a broken listing cannot reach a release.

Every push and pull request

Compiles the book, fails on unresolved cross-references, and publishes a summary listing the screenshots still outstanding and the listings not yet compiled against the SDK.

Every version tag

Builds the PDF and attaches it to a GitHub Release. Tag v0.3.0, and the download link above points at it.

Build it yourself

latexmk -pdf main.tex. Optional font packages degrade gracefully, so a minimal TeX installation is enough.

Corrections wanted

The framework moves faster than the book. If a listing no longer compiles, a package has moved train, or an API has been renamed again, that is worth an issue — it is the most useful contribution this project can receive.

File an erratum Contributing guide