There is a quiet standardization happening underneath the AI agent boom, and it has a name: the Model Context Protocol (MCP). If you build agents, wire tools into coding agents, or ship anything that lets a language model act on the real world, MCP is fast becoming the layer you cannot ignore. That is exactly why the community is gathering for MCP Community Connect , a full-day conference dedicated entirely to the protocol powering how AI agents connect with tools, data, and each other.
Expect a day built around practical, engineering-first content, like:
- Building modern MCP servers
- Designing reliable and secure MCP implementations
- Enterprise lessons from MCP deployments
- Evaluating coding agents with MCP
- MCP client interoperability and frameworks
We've got two events scheduled globally so far:
- MCP Community Connect, San Francisco, Monday 14 September 2026
- MCP Community Connect, Bengaluru, Saturday 26 September 2026
You can subscribe for updates on the event page as new cities are announced. The events are organized by Global AI Community, an organization that puts on community events about AI around the world.
Why MCP matters now
If you have built with large language models recently, you have hit the same wall everyone hits: the model reasons brilliantly but is blind to your world. It cannot read your database, call your internal API, search your documents, or trigger a deployment unless you hand-write glue code for every integration.
Think of MCP as a universal translator for AI applications. Just as USB-C lets any peripheral connect to any laptop without a custom cable per device, MCP lets an AI model connect to any tool or data source through one standardized protocol.
The economics are the real story. Before MCP, integrations were an M × N problem: every one of your M AI applications needed bespoke code to talk to each of your N tools. MCP turns that into an M + N problem. Build a tool once as an MCP server, and any MCP-compatible client, like VS Code, GitHub Copilot, Claude Desktop, Cursor, and many others, can use it immediately.
The protocol is built on a clean client–server model with a small, learnable set of primitives:
- Tools: functions the model can call (query a database, send an email, run code).
- Resources: data the server exposes for context (files, records, documents).
- Prompts: reusable, parameterized prompt templates.
- Elicitation: a server requesting structured input from the user mid-task.
Communication runs over JSON-RPC, with transports for local processes (stdio) and remote servers (streamable HTTP). Write to the spec, and you interoperate with the entire ecosystem. The canonical reference lives at modelcontextprotocol.io.
Your first MCP server: see how little code it takes
The best way to prepare for a builder-focused event is to build something. Here is a minimal MCP server in Python using FastMCP. Notice how the protocol plumbing disappears — you just decorate functions and describe them.
# server.py — a minimal MCP server with two tools
from fastmcp import FastMCP
# Name your server; this identifies it to MCP clients
mcp = FastMCP("Calculator")
@mcp.tool()
def add(a: int, b: int) -> int:
"""Add two numbers and return the result."""
return a + b
@mcp.tool()
def subtract(a: int, b: int) -> int:
"""Subtract b from a and return the result."""
return a - b
if __name__ == "__main__":
mcp.run()
Connecting it in VS Code
Once your server runs, an MCP host connects to it. A typical VS Code configuration looks like this:
{
"servers": {
"calculator": {
"command": "python",
"args": ["server.py"]
}
}
}
VS Code has first-class MCP support directly in the IDE for adding, managing, and debugging servers .
Learn more MCP
If you want to dive more into MCP before the community events, check out these resources:
- MCP for Beginners the most complete hands-on curriculum, with code in C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Rust, and TypeScript, from a 10-line server to a multi-lab production capstone. Start at aka.ms/mcp-for-beginners
- Catalog of official Microsoft MCP servers reference implementations you can learn from and build on: github.com/microsoft/mcp.
- Azure MCP Server connect agents to Azure resources through MCP: Azure MCP Server documentation.
- MCP in VS Code add, configure, and debug servers in your editor: Add and manage MCP servers in VS Code.
- The official specification the source of truth for every primitive and transport: modelcontextprotocol.io.
Microsoft