Microsoft Foundry extension for Azure Developer CLI reaches general availability

The Microsoft Foundry extension bundle for azd reaches version 1.0 with this release. azd provisions Azure resources and deploys application code, while the extension adds agent setup and local testing, with agent and deployment configuration kept in azure.yaml beside the code.

Developers initialize a Python Agent Framework sample with azd ai agent init, then run it locally with azd ai agent run, which opens Agent Inspector while model calls still use the Azure deployment. Running azd deploy uploads source for a remote build, so no local container build is needed. The walkthrough requires azd 1.37.0 or later.

The extension also covers evaluation. After installing the azure.ai.evaluations extension, developers can generate a dataset and grading rubric, run evaluations, and use azd pipeline config to set up GitHub Actions or Azure DevOps pipelines. Microsoft also says azd down deletes the whole resource group for new demo projects, but leaves reused projects in place.

Agent teams can review hosted agent and deployment changes in the same pull request and reuse the same configuration in CI/CD. Evaluation assets can be committed with the code and run after each deployment, with threshold-based quality gates as an option.

Before running azd down, check whether the project was new or reused, since a new project's resource group is deleted with everything in it.