{"id":644,"date":"2026-06-29T18:17:32","date_gmt":"2026-06-29T18:17:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/codingwithramin.com\/?p=644"},"modified":"2026-06-29T18:17:33","modified_gmt":"2026-06-29T18:17:33","slug":"building-a-conversational-work-iq-agent-in-c-the-a2a-sdk-multi-turn-and-streaming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/codingwithramin.com\/?p=644","title":{"rendered":"Building a Conversational Work IQ Agent in C#: The A2A SDK, Multi-Turn, and Streaming"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In Part 1<\/a> we proved the concept: register an Entra app, POST a JSON-RPC envelope to the Work IQ gateway, and get back a grounded, permission-trimmed answer with citations. About forty lines of code, no RAG pipeline, no permission logic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It worked \u2014 but it isn’t an agent. It was one synchronous question, with me hand-building the JSON-RPC envelope and hand-parsing the response, and the user staring at nothing until the whole answer was computed server-side. Three things are missing before this is something you’d actually ship:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. The envelope and parsing should be the SDK’s job, not mine.<\/strong> Hand-rolling JSON-RPC is fine to see once<\/em>; it’s a liability to maintain.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. The agent has no memory.<\/strong> Ask a follow-up like “tell me more about the 2 PM call” and Part 1’s code has no idea what call you mean \u2014 every request starts from zero.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. There’s no streaming.<\/strong> Copilot-quality answers take a few seconds to assemble. Making the user wait in silence for all of it is a bad experience when you could stream tokens as they arrive.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    In this part we fix all three with the A2A .NET SDK<\/strong>: we’ll rebuild the call cleanly, add multi-turn conversations with contextId, and then upgrade to streaming, including the genuinely interesting bit, which is how Work IQ chunks its answer over the wire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    The A2A SDK<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

    A2A is an open protocol, and there’s a first-party .NET SDK for it on NuGet. It’s what Microsoft’s own Work IQ samples use, and it gives you typed Message<\/strong>, Task<\/strong>, and Artifact <\/strong>objects, the JSON-RPC plumbing, and \u2014 the reason we’re here \u2014 clean streaming primitives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    One thing that doesn’t change from Part 1: you still bring your own authenticated HttpClient<\/strong>. The SDK handles the protocol; you handle the token and the A2A-Version<\/strong> header, then hand the client over. That’s actually a nice separation \u2014 your MSAL setup stays exactly as it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Set up the project:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    PowerShell<\/span>