MCP Servers Demystified

Your AI tools are brilliant, and they cannot see a thing you run.

Ask any model about your open invoices, your ticket queue, or last quarter's write-offs and it answers from the public internet, because nothing ever connected it to your systems. Recorded live on July 30, 2026, ArchitectNow President Kevin Grossnicklaus walks through the Model Context Protocol, the open standard that closes that gap, and builds working servers in both C# and TypeScript.

What you'll get

• What MCP is, and where it fits alongside the APIs you already have
• Local stdio servers vs hosted streaming HTTP, and the rule for choosing between them
• Designing tools a reasoning model uses correctly, and why every description is a prompt
• Working implementations in C# and TypeScript, plus testing a server in Postman
• Delegated access with OAuth 2.1 and Microsoft Entra ID, so the AI inherits each employee's own permissions and nothing beyond them
• When to adopt a commercial MCP server instead of writing your own
• A live look at twenty connected servers answering a single prompt

Who it's for

Developers, architects, technical leads, and the IT leaders deciding what AI tooling is allowed to touch real systems.

Session 4 of 6 in the AI on Microsoft series. If MCP is on your roadmap, reach out about an MCP architecture review.