02 · Multi-Turn Conversation

What this lesson demonstrates

In 01_hello_agent every call was independent. Here the agent creates a session once and passes it to every turn with agent.WithSession(session). The second prompt — “now add some emojis and tell it in the voice of a pirate’s parrot” — only makes sense because the session remembers the joke from the first turn. Start a new session and the conversation begins fresh, which the lesson demonstrates by running a second streamed conversation on session2 that never sees the first.

A small turnLogger middleware prints a ===== Run N ===== banner before each run — a first look at wrapping the agent loop while also threading memory through it.

The core code

CreateSession returns a *agent.Session; passing it via agent.WithSession(...) on each RunText is what threads history forward:

session, err := a.CreateSession(ctx)
// ...
resp, err := a.RunText(ctx, "Tell me a joke about a pirate.",
    agent.WithSession(session)).Collect()
resp, err = a.RunText(ctx,
    "Now add some emojis to the joke and tell it in the voice of a pirate's parrot.",
    agent.WithSession(session)).Collect()

What to notice

• The session is the memory. The agent appends every turn to the session and replays the whole history to the model on the next request. Nothing about the agent changes between turns — the state lives entirely in the Session value you pass.
• New session = fresh context. The streamed turns use a second session, so they don’t see the first conversation. The gotcha: forgetting to pass the same session (or accidentally creating a new one) silently drops memory — the model just won’t remember.
• Construction is separated from main. newJoker(...) returns both the agent and its turnLogger, so the offline test builds the identical wiring and drives the middleware directly, asserting it counts one run per turn.

How it maps to Azure AI Foundry

The agent runs against Foundry’s Responses API via foundryprovider.ModelDeployment(model). The Session abstraction is the SDK’s portable notion of conversation state — the same WithSession option works across providers, and later lessons show the session being persisted to disk (step06) or a third-party store (step07). Sessions are how the Microsoft Agent Framework keeps multi-turn context without you hand-managing message arrays.

Run it

go run ./tutorial/02-agents/agents/step02_multiturn_conversation

The program needs Foundry (az login + a project endpoint); the offline tests build the agent with a fake credential and drive the middleware with no network. The live turn is gated behind AF_LIVE=1.

Next: 02 · step03 — Using Function Tools