News

Microsoft Revamps Fledgling AutoGen Framework for Agentic AI

• By David Ramel
• 01/21/2025

Only at v0.4, Microsoft's AutoGen framework for agentic AI -- the hottest new trend in AI development -- has already undergone a complete revamp.

Why?

"The initial release of AutoGen generated widespread interest in agentic technologies," explained a Jan. 14 blog post from Microsoft Research. "At the same time, users struggled with architectural constraints, an inefficient API compounded by rapid growth, and limited debugging and intervention functionality. Feedback highlighted the need for stronger observability and control, more flexible multi-agent collaboration patterns, and reusable components. AutoGen v0.4 addresses these issues with its asynchronous, event-driven architecture."

Microsoft emphasized those last words: asynchronous, event-driven architecture.

That's the key, and the list of framework features starts out with asynchronous messaging and leads into all the other non-monolithic characteristics often associated with modern software development, especially in the cloud:

• Asynchronous messaging: Agents communicate through asynchronous messages, supporting both event-driven and request/response interaction patterns. 
• Modular and extensible: Users can easily customize systems with pluggable components, including custom agents, tools, memory, and models. They can also build proactive and long-running agents using event-driven patterns. 
• Observability and debugging: Built-in metric tracking, message tracing, and debugging tools provide monitoring and control over agent interactions and workflows, with support for OpenTelemetry for industry-standard observability. 
• Scalable and distributed: Users can design complex, distributed agent networks that operate seamlessly across organizational boundaries. 
• Built-in and community extensions: The extensions module enhances the framework's functionality with advanced model clients, agents, multi-agent teams, and tools for agentic workflows. Community support allows open-source developers to manage their own extensions. 
• Cross-language support: This update enables interoperability between agents built in different programming languages, with current support for Python and .NET and additional languages in development. 
• Full type support: Interfaces enforce type checks at build time, improving robustness and maintaining code quality.

The revamp is key to Microsoft's AI development ecosystem, as AutoGen (GitHub repo here) is specifically tasked with creating multi-agent AI applications that can act autonomously or work alongside humans.

This diagram shows how instrumental it is in the company's AI development ecosystem:

AutoGen specifically has tight ties with Semantic Kernel, as detailed in last November's announcement (see "Microsoft Seeks to Sort & Simplify its Agentic AI Dev Story"). The two are both used for agentic AI, as the company explained: "Microsoft's agentic AI frameworks, Semantic Kernel and AutoGen are deeply collaborating to provide the best-in-class agentic developer experience. With Semantic Kernel's enterprise ready AI capabilities, customers can already use and get support for building agent applications and, moving forward, we'll align the multi-agent runtime in AutoGen (called autogen-core) with Semantic Kernel, allowing customers to create enterprise-ready multi-agent solutions."

Here's the ecosystem of the new AutoGen v0.4:

Within that ecosystem upgraded dev tooling now includes:

• Real-time agent updates: View agent action streams in real time with asynchronous, event-driven messages.  
• Mid-execution control: Pause conversations, redirect agent actions, and adjust team composition. Then seamlessly resume tasks. 
• Interactive feedback through the UI: Add a UserProxyAgent to enable user input and guidance during team runs in real time. 
• Message flow visualization: Understand agent communication through an intuitive visual interface that maps message paths and dependencies. 
• Drag-and-drop team builder: Design agent teams visually using an interface for dragging components into place and configuring their relationships and properties. 
• Third-party component galleries: Import and use custom agents, tools, and workflows from external galleries to extend functionality. 
• Magentic-One: A new generalist multi-agent application to solve open-ended web and file-based tasks across various domains. This tool marks a significant step toward creating agents capable of completing tasks commonly encountered in both work and personal contexts.

A separate developer blog post published Jan. 17 indicates what's on tap going forward. "We will soon release a .NET version of v0.4!" the team said. "Our roadmap includes built-in extensions and applications as well as fostering a community-driven ecosystem of extensions and applications -- some of which are already being developed by users."

Microsoft said it has enacted several measures to ensure a smooth upgrade from the previous v0.2 API, including publishing a migration guide.