Microsoft Releases Foundry Dev Pack for Agent Developers

Microsoft has introduced the Foundry Dev Pack, a unified installer designed to consolidate the initial setup steps for its Microsoft Foundry development environment. By reducing the installation process to a single command, the new package prepares developer machines with the necessary tools across command-line interfaces, integrated development environments, and AI-driven coding assistants.

Depending on the user's existing environment, the Dev Pack automatically configures several key components. For terminal-based workflows, it installs the Azure CLI (az), the Azure Developer CLI (azd), and the Microsoft Foundry Extension for azd, enabling developers to scaffold, deploy, evaluate, and automate projects. If Visual Studio Code is detected on the machine, the installer adds the Microsoft Foundry Toolkit for VS Code. Additionally, if the GitHub Copilot App is present, it configures a guided canvas for designing and deploying hosted agents, while also providing reusable workflow guidance to coding agents.

Developers can install the package using platform-specific commands. On macOS systems utilizing Homebrew, the setup runs via the command brew install --cask microsoft/foundry/devpack && foundry-devpack install. Alternatively, users can initiate the installation on Unix-like systems using the curl command curl -fsSL https://aka.ms/foundry-devpack-install.sh | bash.

Once the installation is complete, developers can immediately begin building their first AI agent. Running the command azd ai agent init initializes a new agent from a pre-configured template. Developers using Visual Studio Code can access the Foundry extension in the left Activity Bar to explore templates or build custom agents. For those utilizing coding agents, the package enables natural language commands, allowing developers to prompt their assistant with the phrase, Create my Foundry hosted agent end to end, to automate the entire creation process.