Boston Azure AI

SAVE THE DATE -- THIS EVENT IS HAPPENING FOR SURE.

• Event Registration Opens on Wednesday Dec 31 at 8:00 AM.
• Event is Friday Jan 16. Doors open at 9:00 AM, workshop begins at 9:30.

You are invited to join Boston Azure AI for this is all-day, hands-on, in-person, instructor-led Agent Framework Dev Day - a workshop focused on learning to code Artificial Intelligence using the recently released Microsoft Agent Framework with Microsoft Foundry as the platform for AI agent and model hosting.

Many concepts will be explained and explored. All coding exercises will be done with VS Code using EITHER C# or Python or BOTH - we have not finalized yet - so stay tuned - and give us some feedback in the registration form!

FUN FACT: We operated as Boston Azure from Oct 2009 through Dec 2024. Since January 2025 we've been operating as Boston Azure AI.

Where: Microsoft office in BURLINGTON Massachusetts

• Microsoft Sales & Technology Center
• 5 Wayside Road, Burlington, MA 01803

Government-issued ID is required by facility security staff before they admit you to the building. Microsoft has kindly agreed to host this event. Microsoft facilities staff will verify each attendee via government-issued ID before you are admitted to the event. Accordingly,
‼️ we need to have collected your FIRST AND LAST NAME ahead of time (At least close - e.g., I've not had trouble being "Bill Wilder" on the attendee list while my license says "William Wilder". ‼️
Please provide this as part of registering for the event.

Day Of

• Doors open at 9:00 AM (come for coffee or tea and to get settled), then event starts at 9:30 AM, and event goes until 4:00 PM
• Coffee and tea will be provided
• Lunch is made possible by our friends SPONSORS BEING WORKED OUT. We will communicate more about lunch details (which food) but note that we can't reasonably guarantee support for any specific dietary requirements, so please pay attention to those communications.

Space is always limited for in-person workshops. If the event is full please do sign up for the wait list and we will do our best to accommodate as many as we reasonably can.

Event Details

Hello Boston Azure AI Community!

Join us for this in-person, HANDS-ON, all-day, free coding workshop focused on using the recently released Agent Framework for building AI agents and applications.

WORKSHOP CONTENTS ARE SUBJECT TO MODIFICATION BUT THE FOLLOWING DETAILS ARE INTENDED TO BE DIRECTIONALLY ACCURATE

Workshop Learning Objectives

1. Understanding role and purpose of Agent Framework
2. Basics of setting up and using Agent Framework
3. Prompting techniques for your application to interact with LLMs
4. How to implement [Agentic] RAG and use memory
5. How to create and manage single and multi-agent systems

Workshop Outline
Understanding Agent Framework and how to use it

• Overview of the Agent Framework project
• Add it to an application
• Chat with an LLM
• Add chat history for better context

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)

• Overview of RAG
• What is function calling
• Create functions/plugins in Agent Framework
• Add memory using a persistent data store
• Ways to improve RAG

(UPDATES TO COME)

✅ ✳ ** FIRST DRAFT ** Software Installation Requirements ✳

Please bring your dev laptop running Windows, Mac, or Linux with the following software already installed:

1. VS Code ➜ https://code.visualstudio.com/download

• You should be able to launch the VS Code IDE without errors
• All of the labs are basic console apps, trying to concentrate the lab focus on code, not tools. The labs assume VS Code. We do not plan to support separate labs configured for Visual Studio.

2. .NET 10 ➜ https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download

• Please be sure you can run "dotnet --version" and verify ahead of time that it indicates .NET 10 is running. For example, when I run the command as of this writing, it returns 10.0.100.
• Python 3.13

3. You will need access to Azure OpenAI and Azure SQL DB services. For simplicity, we will provide these for your use during the workshop, after which we will roll the keys so they will stop working.

• But you are also welcome to create your own resources and use them in the workshop. Since you are paying for them at this point, you can decide when to decommission associated resources. You will also need the skills to adjust the lab materials to use your own credentials.

3. You can expect we will recommend you install additional tools and VS Code or Visual Studio extensions as part of the workshop experience.

Looking forward to seeing you at the event!

Jason, Udai, Bill

TENTATIVE EVENT - In-person, hands-on, all-day, free AI Agent Framework Dev day @ CURRY College in Milton.

• Event Registration Opens on Monday Dec 31 at 8:00 AM.
• (PROPOSED) Event is Monday Jan 19, 2026. Doors open at 9:00 AM, workshop begins at 9:30.

See this other event for basic details, except for the LOCATION and DATE.

https://www.meetup.com/bostonazureai/events/312564860/

(bumped this placeholder out to Jan 2030 to give Arra sufficient time 😄)

More details to come, but here's the headline:

Based on his "From the Field" experience, hear Arra Derderian share what technologies, tools, and techniques work for him in the real world as he builds services running on Azure.

DATE TO BE DETERMINED @ 6:00 PM Boston time

This will be an ONLINE/VIRTUAL EVENT or... maybe IN PERSON

Arra bio here

ABSTRACT:

Talk title and abstract will be here