Understand the Microsoft Foundry SDK

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Microsoft Foundry provides a unified approach for building AI applications by connecting to a single project endpoint. The Microsoft Foundry SDK enables developers to work with resources in a Foundry project through language-specific client libraries, making it easier to build AI apps that leverage models, connections, and other resources.

Understanding the Microsoft Foundry SDK

The Microsoft Foundry SDK provides programmatic access to resources in your projects through a REST API and language-specific client libraries. Available SDKs include:

• Azure AI Projects for Python
• Azure AI Projects for Microsoft .NET
• Azure AI Projects for JavaScript

Note

This module uses Python code examples for common tasks. You can refer to the language-specific SDK documentation for equivalent code in your preferred language. Each SDK is developed and maintained independently, so some functionality may be at different stages of implementation.

Installing the SDK

To use the Azure AI Projects library in Python, install the azure-ai-projects package from PyPI along with supporting packages:

pip install azure-ai-projects azure-identity openai

Two client types

The Microsoft Foundry SDK exposes two distinct client types to support different operations:

Project client

The project client (AIProjectClient) provides access to Foundry-native operations that don't have OpenAI equivalents. Use the project client to:

• List and retrieve resource connections
• Access project properties and configuration
• Enable application tracing
• Manage datasets and indexes

OpenAI-compatible client

The OpenAI-compatible client handles operations that build on OpenAI concepts and patterns. Use this client for:

• Generating responses with the Responses API
• Working with agents
• Running evaluations
• Fine-tuning models
• Accessing Foundry direct models (non-Azure-OpenAI models)

Most applications use both clients: the project client for setup and configuration, and the OpenAI-compatible client for generating AI responses.

Connecting to a project

Each Foundry project has a unique endpoint that you can find on the project's Overview page in the Foundry portal at https://ai.azure.com.

The project endpoint follows this format:

https://<resource-name>.services.ai.azure.com/api/projects/<project-name>

Use this endpoint to create an AIProjectClient object:

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.ai.projects import AIProjectClient

project_endpoint = "https://<resource-name>.services.ai.azure.com/api/projects/<project-name>"
project_client = AIProjectClient(
    credential=DefaultAzureCredential(),
    endpoint=project_endpoint
)

Note

The code uses default Azure credentials to authenticate. To enable this authentication, you need to install the azure-identity package (shown in the installation command earlier).

Tip

To access the project successfully, the code must run in an authenticated Azure session. For example, you can use the Azure CLI az login command to sign in before running the code.

Getting an OpenAI-compatible client

Once you have a project client, you can retrieve an OpenAI-compatible client to work with models and generate responses:

from azure.identity import DefaultAzureCredential
from azure.ai.projects import AIProjectClient

# Connect to the project
project_endpoint = "https://<resource-name>.services.ai.azure.com/api/projects/<project-name>"
project_client = AIProjectClient(
    credential=DefaultAzureCredential(),
    endpoint=project_endpoint
)

# Get an OpenAI-compatible client
openai_client = project_client.get_openai_client(api_version="2024-10-21")

The OpenAI-compatible client provides access to the Responses API and other OpenAI-style operations, which you'll learn about in subsequent units.