Connections

All providers of AgentFactories and EmbeddingFactories need credentials to authenticate against the underlying services.

Often, such credentials are a single api-key (or an endpoint + api-key) that can be given to a factory:

//Sample: Creating an OpenAI Agent Factory
OpenAIAgentFactory agentFactory = new OpenAIAgentFactory("<api-key>");

Caution

Remember to always store secrets like api-key in UserSecrets, Environment Variables, Key Vaults, or similar; NEVER directly in the code!

Advanced and Provider Specific Settings

In more advanced cases, however, you might need additional settings for the connection, such as timeouts, endpoints, in which case you make a provider-specific Connection object:

//Sample: Creating an OpenAI Connection
OpenAIConnection connection = new OpenAIConnection
{
    ApiKey = "<api-key>",
    NetworkTimeout = TimeSpan.FromMinutes(5), //Set call timeout
});

//Pass connection to Factory instead of simple api-key
OpenAIAgentFactory agentFactory = new OpenAIAgentFactory(connection);

Options on connections

Property	Decription & Notes	Supported Providers
ApiKey	The API-Key to authenticate against the LLM - GitHub's api-key is called AccessToken - AzureOpenAI offer an RBAC alternative	All
NetworkTimeout	Timeout Settings (if your LLM Calls take longer than the default HTTP Timeout)	All but Google
DefaultClientType	Control if Agents created should use ChatClient or Responses API protocol if not specified specifically by the Agent - Default is ChatClient	AzureOpenAI, OpenAI, OpenRouter, XAI
Endpoint	Control the Endpoint the LLM Talk to - Mandatory for AzureOpenAI; for the rest, this is optional - Can be used in OpenAI to implement 3rd party OpenAI providers	AzureOpenAI, OpenAI, OpenRouter, XAI
AdditionalOpenAIClientOptions	Option to set additional OpenAIClientOptions - Used for not out of the box scenarios for this toolkit	OpenAI, OpenRouter, XAI
Credentials (TokenCredentials)	Azure Role Based Access Control - Use Standard Azure RBAC like example AzureCliCredential	AzureOpenAI
AdditionalAzureOpenAIClientOptions	Option to set additional AzureOpenAIClientOptions - Used for not out of the box scenarios for this toolkit	AzureOpenAI
AdditionalAzureAIInferenceClientOptions	Option to set additional AzureAIInferenceClientOptions - Used for not out of the box scenarios for this toolkit	GitHub
Adapter (IPlatformAdapter)	Option to set additional Google specific connection details AzureAIInferenceClientOptions	Google