Quickstart: Microsoft Agent Framework Durable Workflows

Coming Soon

This tutorial is under development. Check back soon!

What You'll Build

A Microsoft Agent Framework agent wrapped in a Dapr workflow that:

• Survives crashes — Workflow state is checkpointed automatically
• Retries on failure — Failed LLM calls retry with exponential backoff
• Resumes from checkpoint — Restart the app and pick up where you left off

Prerequisites

• Dapr CLI installed and initialized
• .NET 8 SDK
• An OpenAI API key

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                  Dapr Workflow                       │
│  ┌──────────┐    ┌──────────┐    ┌──────────┐      │
│  │  Task 1  │───▶│  Task 2  │───▶│  Task 3  │      │
│  │ (Agent)  │    │ (Agent)  │    │ (Agent)  │      │
│  └──────────┘    └──────────┘    └──────────┘      │
│       │              │               │              │
│       ▼              ▼               ▼              │
│  [Checkpoint]   [Checkpoint]   [Checkpoint]        │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Each agent task becomes a workflow activity. If the process crashes after Task 2, it resumes from that checkpoint—Task 1 and Task 2 won't re-execute.

Key Concepts

Concept	Description
Workflow	A durable, long-running orchestration that survives restarts
Activity	A single unit of work (one agent task) that can be retried
Checkpoint	Automatic state persistence after each activity completes
Retry Policy	Configurable retry behavior for failed activities