With the Foundry Dev Pack, Microsoft is releasing an installation package that allows developers to set up their Microsoft Foundry environment in a single step. The package is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux and combines various existing development tools.
Foundry Dev Pack is designed to simplify the initial setup of a development environment. Instead of installing individual components, developers can add the necessary tools for the terminal, development environment, and coding agents through a single installation process.
CLI and VS Code
The components include the Azure CLI and Azure Developer CLI (azd), supplemented by the Microsoft Foundry Extension for azd. This allows developers to set up, deploy, and evaluate projects, among other tasks, directly from the terminal.
The Microsoft Foundry Skill can also be installed. It contains reusable instructions that allow coding agents to execute Foundry workflows. For users of Visual Studio Code, the package also adds the Microsoft Foundry Toolkit. This makes it possible to build, test, evaluate, and deploy AI applications directly from the editor. The toolkit is only added if VS Code is already installed on the system.
Support for agents as well
The Foundry Dev Pack can also install Foundry Canvas, which Microsoft currently offers as a preview. This allows developers to design and deploy hosted agents via a visual environment. This component is only installed if the GitHub Copilot app is present.
Microsoft is explicitly focusing the package on the development of AI agents as well. For example, from the Azure Developer CLI, you can create an agent based on a template using the command ` azd ai agent init`. Developers can also use VS Code or a coding agent for this purpose.
The installation package works on the three major desktop platforms. Windows users can install it via WinGet, while Microsoft uses Homebrew for macOS. An installation script is available for Linux.
With Foundry Dev Pack, Microsoft isn’t introducing a new development environment per se. The company is primarily bundling existing Foundry and Azure tools into a single installation process, so developers don’t have to configure as many separate components. However, NeoWin reports that the Dev Pack does not install a programming language or its corresponding runtime. Developers must add these themselves, depending on their application.