Chapter 8. Building an Agent

The primary reason for creating software agents is to empower the user. Software agents can often help the user to do more with less effort. That is why they are part of enhanced computing.

Unfortunately, there are many definitions and interpretations of what exactly a software agent is. It gets even more confusing when an agent is considered to be "intelligent." After all, most people have trouble measuring the intelligence of humans, let alone the intelligence of software.

A strategy white paper written for IBM offered the following definition of intelligent software agents:

Intelligent agents are software entities that carry out some set of operations on behalf of a user or another program with some degree of independence or autonomy, and in so doing, employ some knowledge or representation of the user's goals or desires.

A more general definition would state that agents are software that represents users in the same way the users would represent themselves. Just as a sports agent acts in the best interest of an athlete, a software agent should act in the best interest of its client the user. It should be able to identify a specific need that the user has and act on that need.

This chapter will examine some software agents designed to assist remote users in maintaining a local repository of company files available from the corporate Web server. Visual Studio.NET is an idea development tool for the solution in this chapter. The agents are able to utilize built-in functionality to easily automate many of their tasks.