running-agents

Running Agents

The base Agent abstraction exposes various options for running the agent. Callers can choose to supply zero, one, or many input messages. Callers can also choose between streaming and non-streaming. Let's dig into the different usage scenarios.

Streaming and non-streaming

Microsoft Agent Framework supports both streaming and non-streaming methods for running an agent.

::: zone pivot="programming-language-csharp"

For non-streaming, use the RunAsync method.

Console.WriteLine(await agent.RunAsync("What is the weather like in Amsterdam?"));

For streaming, use the RunStreamingAsync method.

await foreach (var update in agent.RunStreamingAsync("What is the weather like in Amsterdam?"))
{
    Console.Write(update);
}

::: zone-end ::: zone pivot="programming-language-python"

For non-streaming, use the run method.

result = await agent.run("What is the weather like in Amsterdam?")
print(result.text)

For streaming, use the run_stream method.

async for update in agent.run_stream("What is the weather like in Amsterdam?"):
    if update.text:
        print(update.text, end="", flush=True)

::: zone-end

Agent run options

::: zone pivot="programming-language-csharp"

The base agent abstraction does allow passing an options object for each agent run, however the ability to customize a run at the abstraction level is quite limited. Agents can vary significantly and therefore there aren't really common customization options.

For cases where the caller knows the type of the agent they are working with, it is possible to pass type specific options to allow customizing the run.

For example, here the agent is a ChatClientAgent and it is possible to pass a ChatClientAgentRunOptions object that inherits from AgentRunOptions. This allows the caller to provide custom xref:Microsoft.Extensions.AI.ChatOptions that are merged with any agent level options before being passed to the IChatClient that the ChatClientAgent is built on.