Microsoft Foundry Fundamentals: A Complete Guide
A comprehensive guide to Azure AI Foundry — from foundations and setup to building agents, RAG pipelines, API gateways, multi-modal apps, orchestration, and agent-to-agent communication. Each chapter includes explanations, code examples, diagrams, and hands-on exercises.
Table of Contents
- 1. Introduction Azure AI Foundry overview, use cases, what you will build
- 2. Community & Setup Community access, Azure setup, SDK installation, VSCode extension
- 3. Foundry Primer Generative AI & Agents, SDK overview, Hub vs Standalone projects, Deploying in Azure, Demo repos
- 4. AI Agents Agent Service Portal, Python agents, Web Searcher, Code Interpreter, OpenAPI Tool, MCP Server, Multi-Tool agents, Browser automation, Memory Store
- 5. End-to-End RAG RAG basics, Vector embeddings, Azure AI Search, Multi-modal RAG, Deploying infra, Creating indexes
- 6. API Management & AI Gateway Gateway concepts, MCP deep dive, Custom MCP servers, Rate limiting, Capabilities
- 7. Foundry IQ Agentic retrieval, Ranking techniques, Knowledge base setup, Portal & Python agents
- 8. Multi-Modal Applications PII masking, Text redaction, Document Intelligence, Invoice analysis
- 9. Agent Orchestration Sequential workflows, Human-in-the-loop, Agent chat systems
- 10. Microsoft Agent Framework Basic chat, MCP tools, Multi-tool agents, DevUI, Structured outputs, Workflows
- 11. Agent-to-Agent Communication A2A protocol, Architecture, Hello World, Streaming, MCP + A2A, Publishing to Azure
- 12. Practice & Resources Quick guide, Resources, Study plan, Bootcamp, Certificate path
- 13. References Glossary, Cheatsheet, API reference