Build AI Agents That Keep Working—Safely
The Agent Harness, Surface squads, a five-rung compaction ladder, authenticated durable WebSockets, versioned Skills, and production hardening arrive together in FabrCore 1.7.1.
Eric Brasher | August 10, 2026 at 7:00 AM CDT | 8 min read
FabrCore v1.7.1 is available today. This release turns long-running agent work into a native, durable part of the runtime—then surrounds it with bounded context, explicit team composition, secure reusable skills, and a real-time protocol designed for production clients.
We created FabrCore at Vulcan365 because useful AI agents need more than a model call. They need identity, persistence, messaging, security, recovery, observability, and a way to keep working when a task cannot be completed in one turn. Version 1.7.1 brings those pieces together for .NET developers building on Microsoft Orleans and Microsoft Agent Framework.
The release in one sentence
Give a FabrCore agent an outcome, let it plan and delegate durable work, and know that context, transport, identity, and execution remain bounded and observable while it finishes.
The Agent Harness Finishes Multi-Step Work
The new Agent Harness composes onto a FabrCoreAgentProxy or Microsoft Agent Framework agent. It gives the model a structured todo list, an iteration loop, plan-and-execute modes, durable snapshots, background delegation, and private internal specialists.
For agent developers, that means the jump from “answer this prompt” to “complete this objective” no longer requires a parallel orchestration service. The work runs inside the same Orleans-backed agent identity that already owns messages, state, health, telemetry, and recovery.
The Harness is composition, not a replacement base class. Existing tools, middleware, instructions, models, and telemetry remain intact. Add it where a workload needs persistence and iteration; keep ordinary single-turn agents simple.
Squads Make the Team Deployable
Surface and FabrCore Blueprints now support top-level squads in two explicit forms. Orchestrator squads model stable conversational teams with a coordinator and durable members. Task squads model objective-driven work with todos, iteration, an executor, subject-matter experts, and bounded delegation.
The experimental Swarm layer and its nested configuration are removed. The replacement has a cleaner operating boundary: Blueprints declare the team, Surface presents and operates it, and native FabrCore agents carry the durable work. Every member remains a real handle with health, state, messaging, and ACL enforcement.
Context Has a Safety Ladder
Long-running agents accumulate tool results and conversation history quickly. FabrCore 1.7.1 controls that growth through five ordered rungs. The cheapest and most reversible action fires first; permanent history rewriting and hard stops remain later in the sequence.
Per-turn input budgets also bound agents that make many individually valid model calls. The runtime describes the resolved ladder and records why a run stopped, giving operators evidence instead of a generic provider error.
WebSocket v2 Is Authenticated and Durable
The new protocol replaces query-string identity with 30-second, single-use tickets and an explicit fabrcore.v2 handshake. Typed operations replace raw wire objects. Stable client ids, ordered sequence numbers, acknowledgements, replay, and explicit gap recovery give applications an honest at-least-once delivery contract.
The new FabrCore.Client.WebSocket package handles ticket acquisition, reconnect backoff, typed request methods, ordered delivery enumeration, checkpoints, and resynchronization events for .NET clients. Browser implementations can use the same documented v2 wire contract.
Skills Are Exact, Immutable, and Principal-Owned
Harness Skills package reusable instructions and reference content as immutable name@version artifacts. Agents select exact versions through _HarnessSkills; there is no floating latest version during execution.
Packages are text and ZIP resources only—no scripts or executables—and administration is principal-scoped behind the FabrCoreAdmin policy. This gives teams a reproducible way to teach agents organization-specific procedures without rebuilding an agent or turning prompt content into trusted executable code.
A Cleaner, More Dependable Runtime
Automatic discovery
AddFabrCoreServer and AddFabrCoreServices scan the application and referenced FabrCore dependency graph. Explicit additional assemblies remain for truly dynamic code.
Secure model management
In-process resolution reads the active store directly. Remote model-configuration routes require the administrative policy and API key.
Cloud reliability
Cloud Server connect long polling now has dedicated timeout and retry behavior instead of inheriting ordinary request settings.
Microsoft 365 polish
Typing timers stop before final success and error responses, preventing a trailing activity after the agent has answered.
Microsoft Agent Framework packages also move together to version 1.16.0, reducing dependency drift across the release.
What This Unlocks for Agent Developers
- Research and engineering agents that can plan, inspect large tool results, delegate reviews, and keep working across activation boundaries.
- Operational command centers backed by explicit squads, real agent health, authenticated transport, and replayable updates.
- Tenant-specific agent procedures distributed as immutable Skills without compiling customer instructions into the application.
- Long-running business workflows whose progress, limits, and failure reasons are durable and observable.
- Real-time .NET applications that reconnect without silently losing principal-targeted agent messages.
The common thread is ownership. The agent owns an outcome inside a runtime that can explain what it planned, what it delegated, how much context it used, and why it completed or stopped.
Upgrade Deliberately
This release contains intentional breaking changes in WebSocket ingress and Swarm configuration. Applications that open raw sockets, provision nested Swarm squads, or supply socket identity through old headers and query parameters must migrate before deployment.
For most server applications, startup becomes simpler because normal referenced agent and plugin projects are discovered automatically. Review model context settings as part of the upgrade so both ContextWindowTokens and MaxOutputTokens are available to the new first-layer compaction controls.
Build the Agent That Owns the Outcome
Update to FabrCore 1.7.1, compose a Harness around an existing agent, and give it one bounded objective. The runtime now has the planning, persistence, context control, delegation, transport, and operational surface to carry that work responsibly.