Microsoft Agent Framework

Where Agent Framework earns its keep is durability. Workflows that checkpoint and resume after a failure, approval steps that pause a run without losing state, background agents that keep working while nobody watches — those are the features that separate a demo from something you put in front of customers. Teams that have already hand-rolled this layer once will recognize the value immediately, because they remember the week they spent on retry logic. We'd reach for it when the team already writes Python or C# and wants the orchestration to live in the repository, under review, next to the rest of the service. The middleware hook is quietly useful here: you can add logging, policy, or behavior changes across every agent without forking the framework, which matters more as a codebase grows past a handful of agents. The migration angle is worth taking seriously. Autogen and Semantic Kernel both have documented port paths, so if you're sitting on either, you're not staring at a rewrite. That's a rare luxury in this space and it's the sort of thing that decides adoption in a large org. Where it bites: hosting. Self-hosting is real work, and the managed path lands on Azure Functions with the Durable Extension. If your infrastructure lives somewhere else and you want the hosting layer cloud-agnostic, you're either building that yourself or passing. The seven-step Learn path also reads like documentation for developers, not for the product manager who wants to see a working agent by Friday. In practice the comparison buyers make is Agent Framework versus Copilot Studio, and they answer different questions. Copilot Studio is where a business user assembles an agent; Agent Framework is where an engineering team builds the runtime and ships it. Plenty of enterprises end up