Build Your First AI Agent in .NET

Companies are now deploying agents that book meetings, process invoices, answer support tickets, and make decisions. So it's time to learn how to build these systems.

In this hands-on workshop, you'll build AI agents that can reason about data, use tools, and hold meaningful conversations.

You'll create a personal finance assistant. An agent that understands natural language, retrieves transaction data, maintains memory across conversations, and helps users make better financial decisions.

Along the way, we'll cover:

• Working with Large Language Models: LLM fundamentals, prompt engineering basics, and raw API calls before wrapping them in a clean abstraction.
• Tool calling: Giving agents the ability to take actions and retrieve external data.
• The agent loop: How agents reason, plan, and iterate over multiple steps.
• Memory and context management: Maintaining state across conversations, and summarising history as it grows.
• Trust, safety, and production: Confirming destructive actions, defending against prompt injection, and adding observability.
• Shipping your agent: Exposing it as an MCP server and graduating to the Microsoft Agent Framework.

We'll use Azure AI services throughout the workshop, but the patterns and code apply to other providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

By the end of this workshop, you'll have:

• A working AI agent integrated into a .NET backend
• Practical experience with tool use, memory, and the agent loop
• Hands-on experience hardening an agent for production and exposing it over MCP
• A clear mental model for when agents add value versus simpler AI approaches
• Confidence to apply these patterns in your own applications

Is this workshop for you?

Yes, if you want to move beyond basic AI integration and build something that reasons.

This workshop is for developers who:

• Know how to build APIs with C#
• Have some exposure to AI concepts (prompts, completions, embeddings)
• Prefer learning by doing over slides and theory

What you'll need

• Your favourite IDE
• .NET 10 SDK
• Git and a GitHub account
• An Azure account (expect around 5–10 € of usage)