Microsoft Applied Skills: Develop a Generative AI Chat App Using the Microsoft Foundry SDK

About the Applied Skills credential

Microsoft Applied Skills: Develop a Generative AI Chat App Using the Microsoft Foundry SDK is not a certification exam in the usual sense. There are no multiple-choice questions and no test center. Instead you are dropped into a live lab environment and given a set of tasks to complete for real: create a Foundry project, pick and deploy a model, write the code for a chat app, and make that app remember the conversation. Your work is scored on what you actually built.

Microsoft rates it at intermediate level and aims it at AI engineers and developers. You need to be comfortable working with Microsoft Foundry and language models, and you must be able to write code in Python or C#, because a large part of the lab is writing and debugging a working app. Compared with a role-based Microsoft certification, it covers one narrow scenario in depth rather than a whole job role.

Assessment format

• Format: A hands-on assessment lab run in a virtual machine connected to a live Azure environment. The tasks are given as a series of emails inside the lab, and unless a task says otherwise you can use any tool or method to complete it.
• Time: Intermediate assessment labs give you 45 minutes, and you can ask for a limited amount of extra time near the end.
• Language: English.
• Scoring: Pass or fail, with a breakdown of how you did on each skill. There is no numeric score per skill.
• Retakes: After you launch the lab you must wait 72 hours before launching it again. Starting the lab counts as an attempt even if you don't submit it.

There is no save-and-resume: you finish the tasks in one sitting and submit them for scoring.

What the assessment covers

Microsoft lists three skills, and the official study guide breaks them into tasks:

• Prepare and deploy a model in Microsoft Foundry. Creating a Foundry project, choosing a model from benchmarks and quality metrics on the model leaderboard, picking a deployment type, running an evaluation of the model, and setting guardrails and content safety controls.
• Create a chat app by using the Microsoft Foundry SDK. Setting up the development environment with the right packages, initialising a client against the project endpoint with Microsoft Entra credentials, getting the role assignments right so the code is allowed to call the model, and running and debugging the app.
• Implement chat history. Creating an object that holds the conversation, adding each user and assistant turn to it, and sending that history with every request so the model has the context of earlier turns.

How the practice questions here are organised

There is one 10-question practice test, split across the three skills in roughly the same balance as the lab: four questions on preparing and deploying a model, four on building the app with the Foundry SDK, and two on chat history. Because the real assessment is a hands-on lab, these multiple-choice questions can't reproduce it. What they check is the knowledge behind each task: which package and client to use, which deployment type fits a data residency rule, which role a developer needs, and how to keep a long conversation within the model's context window. They don't test whether you can type the code under time pressure. Each explanation links to the Microsoft Learn page it is based on.

A study plan that works

• Take the practice test to find gaps in your understanding of Foundry and the SDK.
• Work through the Microsoft Learn modules linked from the study guide, and do their exercises in your own Azure subscription rather than only reading them.
• Build the chat app yourself at least twice, once from a blank file. Create the project, deploy a model, write the client code, add chat history, and run it.
• Time yourself on the second build. Forty-five minutes goes quickly when a deployment is slow, so practise starting the slow steps first and coding while they run.
• Read every task in the lab before starting, and do only what each task asks.

These questions are original, written from the public Microsoft Learn documentation and the official study guide. They are not real assessment tasks, and this site is not affiliated with Microsoft.