Weekly Update 4 August 2025 – A2A .NET SDK, ACS Ideas, Setup GitHub Copilot Agent

This week:

Building AI Agents with the A2A .NET SDK

10 Things You Might Not Know You Could Do with Azure Communication Services

Onboarding your AI peer programmer: Setting up GitHub Copilot coding agent for success

You can also listen to the audio-only version: Thoughtstuff Podcast – Tom Morgan on Teams Dev: Weekly Update 4 August 2025

Find all my videos at thoughtstuff.co.uk/videos. You can also subscribe to the audio-only version of these videos, either via iTunes, Spotify or your own podcasting tool.

Transcript (AI generated)

Hello, welcome to another weekly update.

🧠 Azure AI Foundry and the A2A.NET SDK

This week I’m diving into a blog post from the Azure AI Foundry blog, focused on building AI agents using the A2A.NET SDK. The Agent-to-Agent protocol, or A2A, is shaping up to be a promising industry-wide standard for agent interoperability. This new .NET SDK implementation makes it significantly easier to integrate A2A capabilities into your bots without implementing everything from scratch.

Key features include agent discovery, capability discovery, support for different communication patterns, and real-time streaming. Although still in preview, it’s already gaining attention and likely won’t stay in preview for long. It’s built with Semantic Kernel and Azure AI Foundry environments in mind, which might initially confuse developers familiar with Microsoft 365’s agent SDK, Copilot Studio, or other bot frameworks. But this new SDK is separate and part of a broader Azure ecosystem, rather than Microsoft 365.

💬 Azure Communication Services (ACS) – More Than You Think

The next topic is Azure Communication Services. A recent blog post covered 10 things you might not know ACS can do. While not a new announcement, it’s a great awareness piece.

If you’ve used ACS before, you might not realize how much it has evolved. Besides supporting chat, voice, video, email, and SMS, it now integrates more deeply with AI. Imagine enabling users to reschedule appointments just by texting in natural language, and the system understanding and routing that appropriately using Azure OpenAI—very powerful!

Also covered: WhatsApp support, embedding Teams calls in your CRM, and sending reminders. The mix of AI and communication tooling makes this ripe for real-world applications. There’s enough here for a full conference session, honestly—I might pick that up again!

🤖 GitHub Copilot as an Autonomous Agent

Lastly, a new blog post from GitHub titled “Onboarding Your AI Peer Programmer” caught my attention. Initially, I misunderstood what it was about—but it turns out it’s about evolving how you use GitHub Copilot from a code helper to a task-owning agent.

Instead of asking Copilot to help you write code live, you assign it an issue in your GitHub repo. Copilot then branches, creates a PR, completes the work, and comes back for review—just like a new team member would. This approach is a level of abstraction above “co-coding” and opens the door for more autonomous development flows. Definitely something I’ll be exploring.

☀️ Signing Off for Summer

That covers this week! I’ll be taking a holiday for the next three weeks, so there will be no updates during that time. Have a fantastic August, and I’ll see you in September!

Thanks for watching and reading. 👋