Sept Meetup - Azure Comms Service and A Starship AI in .NET
Details
Ethan Zeccola - Azure Communication Services: The Comms Stack You Already Own
Every application eventually needs to talk to someone. An SMS to confirm a booking, an email receipt, a video call with a support agent. The usual answer is to bolt on a third-party service, which means another vendor, another bill, another set of credentials, and customer data taking a trip outside your tenant.
Azure Communication Services is Microsoft's first-party answer to that problem: SMS, email, chat, voice, and video, exposed as SDKs and REST APIs and living inside the same subscription, identity model, and compliance boundary as everything else you run. It also behaves like a normal Azure resource: deployable with Bicep, governed with RBAC, and observable through Azure Monitor. I'll walk through what the service actually covers, then demo it live, standing one up and getting a message out the door, so you can see how much work it really takes.
Stuart Dobson - My Ship's AI Told Me It Was Cooling the Reactor: A Starship AI in .NET
You are the captain of the ISV Kestrel. AURORA, the ship's intelligence, is a HarnessAgent wrapped around an IChatClient. Order it to seal a hull breach and it confidently reports the breach sealed, while the compartment keeps venting six turns later.
This talk builds a starship AI on the new Microsoft Agent Framework harness in .NET, and uses it to show where an agent framework helps and where it fabricates its own reality:
- why there is deliberately no GetShipStatus tool, and what ambient state belongs in the context window instead
- why forbidding invented readings does nothing to forbid invented actions
- driving the whole thing from a deterministic simulation, so agent behaviour is a controlled comparison
You'll leave knowing how to wire a harness agent in C#, which defaults to turn off first, and how to spot when a built-in harness provider, not your prompt, is putting words in your agent's mouth.