On January 16, 2026, I co-hosted the Microsoft Agent Framework Dev Day (Hands-on) in Burlington, MA, with Bill Wilder and Jason Haley. This full-day workshop was entirely lab-driven and focused on building production-ready AI agents using real architecture patterns.
Event details:
👉 https://www.meetup.com/bostonazureai/events/312564860/
As part of the Agent Framework Dev Project, attendees implemented end-to-end agent solutions including orchestration, agentic RAG with Azure AI Search, MCP-based tool integration, and workflow graphs. The sessions were highly interactive, with participants building sequential and concurrent workflows, adding human-in-the-loop checkpoints, and testing governed tool access throughout the day.
Microsoft Agent Framework in Practice
Microsoft Agent Framework is an open-source platform for building agents in .NET and Python, combining multi-agent collaboration, enterprise orchestration, state management, and observable graph workflows. It enables safe tool calling, enterprise data access, and long-running processes with full traceability—key for real deployments.
Workshop Focus
The hands-on labs covered:
- Agent foundations and safety
- Agentic RAG patterns
- MCP tool discovery and execution
- Sequential and concurrent workflow orchestration
The emphasis was on reliability, governance, and reusability, which are essential for enterprise AI.
Further Learning
Workshop labs and materials are available here:
- https://github.com/AgentFrameworkDev/agent-framework-dev-day
- https://github.com/nhcloud/agentframework-workshop
These repos provide step-by-step exercises for building agents, workflows, and MCP-enabled tool integrations.
Thank You
A special thank-you to Akumina for supporting community learning and helping bring an enterprise AI architecture perspective to the workshop.
Huge thanks to my co-hosts Bill Wilder and Jason Haley for their technical leadership and for making the event practical and impactful.
We’ll continue to run hands-on sessions focused on real-world agent architectures, MCP tool ecosystems, and enterprise workflows. If you’re building agents and want to collaborate or host a future Dev Day, let’s connect.