Session Recap: The Evolution of .NET AI — From Raw Requests to Autonomous Agents

October 8, 2025 — Cyber RGV Monthly Meetup, McAllen Public Library

RGVDevs organizer Josh Morales was back at the October Cyber RGV meetup for a second round, this time tackling a question a lot of .NET developers are asking right now: where does .NET actually stand when it comes to building AI-powered applications? The answer, laid out across five live demos, is: further along than most people realize.

The session traced the evolution in five distinct stages. It started at the bottom" hand-rolling raw HTTP calls to OpenAI and Gemini, wiring up every header, payload, and response format by hand, proprietary SDK by proprietary SDK. From there it climbed through Semantic Kernel, which abstracted that plumbing into natural-language prompts and orchestration; Microsoft.Extensions.AI, which standardized model access behind a single IChatClient interface so swapping providers becomes a one-line config change instead of a rewrite; and AutoGen.NET, which introduced multi-agent collaboration: agents that can call functions and hand work off to each other. Each layer solved a real limitation the previous one left behind, and each demo built directly on the one before it.

The session landed on the newest piece of the puzzle: the Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF), released just a week before the talk. The closing demo pulled every prior concept together into a stateful customer service agent — one that creates support tickets, looks up orders, generates replacement tracking numbers, and drafts confirmation emails, built in essentially three lines of agent code. The entire conversation thread can even be serialized, saved to a file, and resumed months later with full context intact, with no re-explaining who you are or what you needed.

Attendees saw a complete map of the .NET AI ecosystem and where each feature fits, plus a live look at just how much complexity modern .NET now hides behind a handful of lines of code.

If you weren't there for the session, the full recording is on YouTube:

Watch: The Evolution of .NET AI — From Raw Requests to Autonomous Agents.

A big thank-you to Cyber RGV for hosting once again and giving our community the floor. Learn more about their work at rgv-cyber.org.

Want in on what's next? Join the conversation in the RGVDevs Facebook Group and keep an eye on rgvdevs.net for upcoming sessions.