Model Context Protocol

From first principles to building real servers and tools: a guided path through everything MCP.

MCP Explained: Empower your AI — Integrating AI models with diverse data sources and tools can be complicated. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) simplifies this process, helping you seamlessly connect AI to external tools and data.
Get started with the official Microsoft's Azure MCP Server — Ready to talk to your Azure resources like you talk to a teammate? Big news: Microsoft's Azure MCP Server is now in public preview - and it's about to change the way we interact with Azure using AI.
From Manual Testing to AI-Generated Automation with MCP — Chain an Azure DevOps MCP server with a Playwright MCP server into one agent that turns manual test cases into runnable automated tests.
Hosting MCP Servers in Production with FastMCP Cloud — Building an MCP server is the easy part; the friction is everything after mcp.run(): remote transport, auth, CI/CD, and JSON-RPC observability. A practical look at how FastMCP Cloud collapses the deploy step from a repo to a live authenticated endpoint, and where self-hosting still wins.
Generating UI Components from Figma with the Dev Mode MCP Server — Figma's Dev Mode MCP server does more than turn a frame into markup. It hands your coding agent the design's real structure. Here's how to set it up, which tools matter, and why Code Connect is the difference between a lookalike and code you'd actually merge.
How AI Agents Pay: A Practical Guide to the Agent Payments Protocol — AP2 isn't really about moving money. It's an accountability protocol that turns "did the user actually want this?" into a signed, verifiable object. Here's how its Mandate chain works and what to build now.
Apps Inside ChatGPT: Building on the MCP App Platform — OpenAI's Apps SDK is the Model Context Protocol with a UI layer and a distribution channel attached. Here's what your MCP server actually exposes, the three-way data split that trips developers up, and what you give up when ChatGPT owns app discovery.
Turn Your Azure APIs into MCP Servers with API Management — Azure API Management can project the REST APIs you already govern as Model Context Protocol tools: behind the same gateway, with the same auth, rate limits, and telemetry. Here's how it works, the streaming gotcha that will cost you an afternoon, and where the feature's edges currently are.
Your Pocket DevOps: Managing Apps with the Aspire MCP Server — The Aspire MCP server hands your AI coding agent a live view of a running distributed app: resources, logs, traces, and the commands to act on them. Here's what it exposes, how to wire it up with one CLI command, and why running over STDIO changes the security math.
Building MCP Servers by Dragging Blocks: Visual MCP Explained — Visual, block-based MCP builders work because an MCP tool is a tiny declarative contract. Here's what the canvas automates, the two things it can't, and when to drag blocks versus hand-write the server.
MCP Apps Explained: Interactive Tool UIs Inside the Chat — MCP Apps is the first official Model Context Protocol extension: it lets a server ship an interactive UI alongside a tool, rendered in a sandboxed iframe right in the conversation. Here is how the ui:// resource model, the _meta.ui link, and the JSON-RPC-over-postMessage contract actually fit togeth
Giving Coding Agents Database Awareness with a Cosmos DB MCP Plugin — Coding agents write queries against schemas they've never seen. The Azure Cosmos DB MCP Toolkit closes that gap with seven read-only tools, Entra ID auth, and a deliberate no-writes design. Here's how it works and why read-only is the right default.
Event-Driven AI Agents: Pushing Real-Time Events into a Session — Modeling an agent as a long-running session you push events into: not a function you call and await. Is what lets you interrupt, redirect, and steer it mid-run. A concrete look at the event model behind the Claude Agent SDK and Managed Agents.
Build Your Own Code Agent: Tool Calling, Memory, and MCP from Scratch — Strip away the framework and a code agent is a while loop over tool calls. Here's how the calling contract, the message-array memory, and MCP fit together, and where each one breaks.