.Net: Phase 1 of the declarative agent schema for review

[markwallace-microsoft]

Motivation and Context

Related #10224

Includes following

• Model classes for the Agent Definition
• An Agent Factory abstraction which is used to create an Agent instance from it's serialised form
• Agent Factory implementations for Chat Completion, OpenAI Assistant and AzureAI Agent implementations

Description

Contribution Checklist

• The code builds clean without any errors or warnings
• The PR follows the SK Contribution Guidelines and the pre-submission formatting script raises no violations
• All unit tests pass, and I have added new tests where possible
• I didn't break anyone 😄

[joslat]

Hi @markwallace-microsoft,
here is some feedback, hope it helps... I think it is great to support Declarative formats, maybe I'd make some base support for YAML and JSON as "base declarative formats" and implement custom plugins on top that support the existing declarative formats supported and the proposed Microsoft 365 copilot. this could make it easier to implement and add any new declarative format.

Maybe support:

• Copilot Studio Agents? (I thnink a format json-yaml is generated below the hood to drive behavior...)
• Azure AI Foundry Agents / Azure AI Agents (I believe this is code but with declarative style, though haven't explored it yet... still need to check Chris bits added some days ago - essentially I don't know what I am talking about and making an hypothesis)
• AutoGen (in the studio there is a yaml/json definition that is used to persist an agent, so that could, might be a thing)
• Other: unsure other frameworks like langgraph, langchain, crew ai, swarm, amazon bedrock or google services have a declarative format...

Unsure this helps, pretty much high level.

[markwallace-microsoft]

Hi @markwallace-microsoft, here is some feedback, hope it helps... I think it is great to support Declarative formats, maybe I'd make some base support for YAML and JSON as "base declarative formats" and implement custom plugins on top that support the existing declarative formats supported and the proposed Microsoft 365 copilot. this could make it easier to implement and add any new declarative format.

Maybe support:

• Copilot Studio Agents? (I thnink a format json-yaml is generated below the hood to drive behavior...)
• Azure AI Foundry Agents / Azure AI Agents (I believe this is code but with declarative style, though haven't explored it yet... still need to check Chris bits added some days ago - essentially I don't know what I am talking about and making an hypothesis)
• AutoGen (in the studio there is a yaml/json definition that is used to persist an agent, so that could, might be a thing)
• Other: unsure other frameworks like langgraph, langchain, crew ai, swarm, amazon bedrock or google services have a declarative format...

Unsure this helps, pretty much high level.

Thanks for the feedback @joslat

• I'm using YAML in the document for my samples nut JSON would also be supported
• The goal is to have a format which is Agent Service agnostic and will support Azure AI Agents, OpenAI Assistants, Chat Completion Agents, AutoGen, etc.
• Another goal to be able able to convert from other formats to this one.