Agents SDK Templates for Visual Studio

[mdesalvo]

Bot Framework 4 had a VSIX package containing Visual Studio templates (Bot Framework v4 SDK Templates for Visual Studio). Should it be possible to have an Agents SDK equivalent? So that we can start building our agent apps from an official Microsoft C# template.

[MattB-msft]

Those templates were moved into the M365 Agents Toolkit. Also the raw forms of those are here github.com/microsoft/agents/samples

Is there a specific template your looking for?

[mdesalvo]

I saw M365 Agents Toolkit but I didn't find what I expected: it is built with Teams in mind, not really my use case. The samples are just snippets of educational code, not production-ready templates helping to startup enterprise projects. I think it would be helpful to give developers the chance to not start from scratch or by pasting amorphous and uncontextualized C# code snippets: in this aspect BF4, with its ASP.NET VSIX templates, boosted time-to-market by scaffolding everything needed for day 0 "BotBuilder" development effort.

[MattB-msft]

Sorry for the delay in responding, @mdesalvo

That's good feedback.
We have been placing more focus on developing Agent Skills to aid in this type of development across our supported languages. We have several of those skills currently in development and a few in PR form on the Agent root repo.

Our goal is to setup skills so that you could describe what it is you needed and the AI Coding assistance would be able to assemble the framework of your agent using the skills we provide.

you can see a few of them here: microsoft/Agents#506