Microsoft’s popular coding application Visual Studio gets support for Model Context Protocol servers.
Microsoft has made local and remote MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers available in Visual Studio. Thanks to MCP protocol from Anthropic, the Agent mode in Visual Studio has become much more extensive.
Extended Capabilities
MCP is an open standard that allows AI agents to easily connect with internal business tools. From GitHub Copilot Chat, developers can configure and work with tools, for example to set up custom MCP servers, choose existing servers to automate tasks, or call internal APIs.
Additionally, authentication and server installation have been improved. Users log in to the server via secure endpoints that support MCP authentication. Adding such an MCP server is done with a single button. The server list on GitHub includes not only nearly 400 official servers, but also 750 community servers. Anthropic itself warns that “community servers have not been tested and should be used at your own risk.”
Visual Studio Code
In April this year, Visual Studio Code, the less extensive sibling of Visual Studio, also received the agent mode, allowing developers to execute complex actions via text prompts. The agent mode is powered by multiple models, including Claude 3.5 and 3.7 Sonnet from Anthropic, Gemini 2.0 Flash from Google, and GPT-4o from OpenAI.