Microsoft Foundry Toolkit for Visual Studio Code overview

Microsoft Foundry Toolkit for Visual Studio Code is an extension for building, testing, deploying, evaluating, and monitoring AI apps and agents. Use it locally or connect to Microsoft Foundry to manage your AI development workflow without leaving Visual Studio Code.

Foundry Toolkit is the new name for AI Toolkit. It also includes the capabilities previously provided by the separate Microsoft Foundry extension, so you can work with local resources and Foundry resources in one extension.

Who should use Foundry Toolkit

Foundry Toolkit supports different roles and levels of AI development experience:

• Application developers can add generative AI features to web, desktop, and mobile apps.
• AI and machine learning engineers can compare, customize, optimize, and deploy models and agents.
• Data scientists and researchers can experiment with prompts, models, datasets, and evaluation criteria.
• Educators and students can explore generative AI concepts through interactive playgrounds and local models.

How the Toolkit workspace is organized

Foundry Toolkit separates resources that you have from actions that you can take. The extension has three main sections.

The exact tools and resource types can change as the extension evolves. Use the Toolkit view to see the features in your installed version.

Work with models

Foundry Toolkit provides an end-to-end model development workflow:

• Use the Model Catalog to discover models from Foundry and external providers, or use local models through ONNX, Ollama, and Foundry Local.
• Compare models and test prompts, parameters, images, and attachments in the Model Playground.
• Convert, quantize, optimize, and evaluate supported models for local Windows deployment.
• Fine-tune supported models locally with a GPU or remotely with Azure Container Apps.
• Profile CPU, GPU, and NPU usage for supported Windows machine learning workloads.

Build and operate agents

Foundry Toolkit supports prompt agents and code-based hosted agents:

• Use Agent Builder to configure instructions, models, variables, structured outputs, and tools without creating an agent code project.
• Use the Tool Catalog to discover Foundry tools, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, and toolboxes, and then add them to agents.
• Scaffold a hosted agent project when you need custom code, frameworks, or orchestration logic.
• Use Agent Inspector to debug local agents, inspect streaming responses and tool calls, and visualize workflow execution.
• Deploy hosted agents to Foundry Agent Service from source code or a container image.
• Test deployed agents in the Hosted Agent Playground, inspect logs and traces, and manage versions.
• Evaluate models, prompts, and agents with datasets, built-in evaluators, or custom criteria.

Some Toolkit experiences are available in preview. Review the Foundry Toolkit changelog for release details.

Manage Foundry resources

Sign in to Azure and set a Foundry project to manage cloud resources from Visual Studio Code. You can:

• Browse Foundry projects and the resources available to your account.
• Discover and deploy models from the Foundry model catalog.
• View model endpoints and authentication information.
• Create, deploy, test, and version prompt agents, workflows, and hosted agents.
• Browse tools and knowledge sources used by your agents.
• Open evaluations, conversations, logs, and traces during development.

For broader resource administration, use the Foundry portal. To automate a workflow in application code, use the Microsoft Foundry SDKs.

Related content

• Install Foundry Toolkit for Visual Studio Code
• Set up a Foundry project in Visual Studio Code
• Report a Foundry Toolkit issue
• Choose how to build with Microsoft Foundry