Building Production-Ready AI Agents with Microsoft Agent Framework Course

Moving from an AI prototype to a production-ready application requires much more than calling an LLM. This course provides a practical introduction to Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF), Microsoft's open-source framework for building structured, scalable, and maintainable AI agents. Using a hands-on dentist appointment booking system, it demonstrates how to design agents that interact with external tools, maintain conversation history, remember user preferences, and execute complex business processes.

The course covers:

• Agent fundamentals: understanding the agentic loop, prompt design, tools, sessions, memory, context providers, and middleware.
• Building real applications: creating agents that search, retrieve, update, and persist data while supporting multi-turn conversations.
• Workflows and orchestration: when to use agents versus workflows, multi-agent architectures, handoff patterns, human-in-the-loop approvals, checkpointing, and durable execution.
• Production practices: choosing appropriate LLMs, monitoring with Application Insights, testing with DevUI, managing configuration, and deploying agents as Azure AI Foundry Hosted Agents.

A recurring theme throughout the course is that an AI agent is essentially a language model equipped with tools to accomplish a goal. Rather than focusing on a single demo, the instructor teaches reusable design patterns that can be applied to customer support, booking systems, research assistants, and many other enterprise AI solutions. By the end, you'll understand not only how to build intelligent agents, but also how to make them reliable, observable, secure, and ready for production.

Course: Building Agents with Microsoft Agent Framework – Pluralsight