The Microsoft Agent Framework Harness is now released

The Microsoft Agent Framework Harness is now released | Microsoft Agent Framework

Principal Software Engineer

Your agents can now be built on a stable, batteries-included harness – the loop, planning, memory, context management, approvals, and telemetry that turn a model into an agent that actually does things – in both Python and .NET.

What is an agent harness?

An agent harness is the scaffolding that turns a language model into an agent. A model on its own can only generate text. To have it call tools, work through multi-step tasks, remember what it has done, and keep going until the job is finished, you need a runtime wrapped around the model – and that runtime is the harness.

Agent Framework ships a ready-made one so you don’t have to build that scaffolding yourself. It’s an opinionated, fully customizable, batteries-included agent that wraps a chat client with a complete agentic pipeline, tuned for long-running, autonomous work such as research, data analysis, and general task automation. Internally it’s just a chat-client agent (Agent in Python,ChatClientAgent in .NET) with a curated set of Agent Framework features added – each enabled by default and individually customizable or removable:

• Function invocation – the automatic tool-calling loop, with a configurable iteration limit.
• Per-service-call history persistence – chat history saved after every model call for crash

recovery and mid-run inspection.

• Compaction – context-window management so long tool-calling loops don’t overflow.
• Todo & agent-mode providers – a persistent todo list plus plan/e