AutoGen's Successor: Microsoft Agent Framework, 17 Exercises

About this course

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence."

I set out to learn AutoGen, only to discover it had entered maintenance mode" — if that's you, this course was made exactly for that situation.

AutoGen moved into maintenance mode in October 2025, and its successor, Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF), reached general availability in April 2026. Microsoft officially describes MAF as the direct successor to both AutoGen and Semantic Kernel, built by the same team. It combines AutoGen's simple agent abstraction with Semantic Kernel's enterprise features — session management, type safety, and checkpointing. This course covers that successor framework, and includes a migration section for developers coming from AutoGen.

MAF rests on two pillars: Agents (autonomous) and Workflows (controlled). One lets the AI make the call; the other lets a human fix the execution order. Knowing when to use which is exactly what turns a demo into a production system. This course builds both up through 17 hands-on exercises.

The course follows an 8-part roadmap. Section 1 covers the three-layer structure of ChatClient, Agent, and Session; Section 2 teaches how to give an agent tools with `@tool`. Section 3 is the first major milestone: multi-agent orchestration. It diagrams the five standard orchestration patterns, then has you build parallel review and a reception-to-specialist handoff yourself.

Section 4 opens the second major milestone: Workflows. You move from writing procedurally with `@workflow` and `@step`, to building a directed graph with `Workflow

Builder`, through conditional branching (switch-case) and parallelism (fan-out / fan-in). A type mismatch fails before execution even starts — you'll experience catching bugs without calling an LLM even once. Section 5 covers three features every real deployment needs: human-in-the-loop approval via `request_info`, checkpointing that resumes a failed run partway through, and visualization with DevUI.The final chapter, Sectio

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