How to: Create and use Dapr AI Conversations in the .NET SDK

Prerequisites

• .NET 8, .NET 9, .NET 10, or .NET 11 installed
• Dapr CLI
• Initialized Dapr environment

Installation

To get started with the Dapr AI .NET SDK client, install the Dapr.AI package from NuGet:

dotnet add package Dapr.AI

These guides target SDK 1.19.0 or later. Configure a conversation component and credentials for its model provider. Import Dapr.AI.Conversation and Dapr.AI.Conversation.Extensions. The API is experimental (DAPR_CONVERSATION).

A DaprConversationClient maintains access to networking resources in the form of TCP sockets used to communicate with the Dapr sidecar.

Dependency Injection

The AddDaprConversationClient() method registers the client with dependency injection and is the recommended approach for using this package. This method accepts an optional options delegate for configuring the DaprConversationClient and a ServiceLifetime argument, allowing you to specify a different lifetime for the registered services instead of the default Singleton value.

The following example assumes all default values are acceptable and is sufficient to register the DaprConversationClient:

services.AddDaprConversationClient();

The optional configuration delegate is used to configure the DaprConversationClient by specifying options on the DaprConversationClientBuilder as in the following example:

services.AddSingleton<DefaultOptionsProvider>();
services.AddDaprConversationClient((serviceProvider, clientBuilder) => {
     //Inject a service to source a value from
     var optionsProvider = serviceProvider.GetRequiredService<DefaultOptionsProvider>();
     var standardTimeout = optionsProvider.GetStandardTimeout();
     
     //Configure the value on the client builder
     clientBuilder.UseTimeout(standardTimeout);
});

Manual Instantiation

Rather than using dependency injection, a DaprConversationClient can also be built using the static client builder.

For best performance, create a single long-lived instance of DaprConversationClient and provide access to that shared instance throughout your application. DaprConversationClient instances are thread-safe and intended to be shared.

Avoid creating a DaprConversationClient per-operation.

A DaprConversationClient can be configured by invoking methods on the DaprConversationClientBuilder class before calling .Build() to create the client. The settings for each DaprConversationClient are separate and cannot be changed after calling .Build().

var daprConversationClient = new DaprConversationClientBuilder()
    .UseGrpcEndpoint("http://localhost:50001")
    .Build();

See the .NET documentation here for more information about the options available when configuring the Dapr client via the builder.

Try it out

Put the Dapr AI .NET SDK to the test. Walk through the samples to see Dapr in action:

Building Blocks

This part of the .NET SDK allows you to interface with the Conversations API to send and receive messages from large language models.

See conversation requests and responses for message roles, options, response schemas, caching, and token usage, and tool calling for the application-managed tool-call cycle.