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What Tracon is

Tracon is a .NET package family that adds a control plane on Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF). MAF executes the agent and its model/tool loop. Tracon adds agent definitions, configurable execution controls, HTTP endpoints, default-on run recording, and an optional embedded console.

The packages run inside your host process. You choose the model providers, persistence, identity integration, and operational policies. Recording is best-effort: a recording-store failure is logged while agent execution continues.

What you get


Definitions	An agent as data: model, prompt, tools, skills, callable agents. Versioned, with rollback
Runs	Default-on recording — status, timings, tokens, cost, tool calls, traces, and an ordered event stream
HTTP API	177 generated operations, plus OpenAI-compatible Responses and Chat Completions surfaces
Console	30 screens embedded when you add `Tracon.UI` and call `UseUI()`
Workflows	Multi-agent execution with checkpoints and human-in-the-loop
Evaluation	Suites, cases, automatic judges, and A/B experiments between agent versions
Governance	Roles, scoped API keys, tenancy, approvals, guards, quotas, retention, webhooks, and audit

See the complete capability map for providers, testing, RAG, voice, scheduling, external protocols, and production operations.

What it deliberately is not

It is not an abstraction over MAF. AIAgent, AgentSession, ChatMessage, and AIFunction are used directly and appear in the public API as themselves. There is no parallel type hierarchy to learn and nothing between you and MAF’s own extension points.

It is not a place to write code. Tools are defined in your codebase and nowhere else. An agent can be created and edited from the console, but tool code can never be written through it — see tools for the two narrow, guarded exceptions.

It is not a hosted service. Tracon does not provide a managed hosting account. Your host controls outbound connections: configured model providers, exporters, webhooks, and integrations can send data outside the process. You can use a cloud model API or a compatible self-hosted engine such as Ollama or vLLM — see picking a model provider.

Four rules it will not break

These conventions explain the default setup and the extension model.

Explicit infrastructure. AddTracon() supplies in-memory store defaults. Configure a model provider or a custom agent source for execution, and choose persistence when data must survive a restart.
Tools are code only. The console selects from registered tools; it never defines them.
MAF objects are passed through, not wrapped.
Replaceable services. Default registrations of the documented extension points use TryAdd so a consumer registration can supply the implementation. Follow each extension guide for its lifetime and registration contract. Interfaces that only Tracon’s own packages use are internal.

Is it for you?

It fits when you are building agents in .NET and want the operational layer without building it: a record of what happened, a console for operators and teams that should not need to modify application code, and a way to change supported agent configuration without a deployment.

It does not fit if you want a hosted agent product, or if you are not on .NET. Runtime packages target net8.0, net9.0, and net10.0, and the testing packages follow the same matrix, so an app on .NET 8 LTS can be tested on .NET 8. The project template generates a net10.0 project pinned to the template package’s own Tracon version (--TraconVersion x.y.z overrides it), the tracon global tool targets net10.0, and the source generator that ships inside Core targets netstandard2.0. The compatibility matrix carries the per-package detail, including how long each target framework stays in the matrix.