Slide Deck: MCP Servers Demystified (CAS Monthly Meetup 2026)

Your AI tools are brilliant and locked in a box. Copilot and Claude know everything about public code and nothing about your work items, your database, or your internal APIs.

In this CAS Monthly Meetup session, ArchitectNow Founder and President Kevin Grossnicklaus builds MCP servers live in C# and TypeScript, and shows the same server binary running in Claude, GitHub Copilot, and a custom agent. Every AI product times every system used to mean N times M custom integrations; MCP collapses that to N plus M.

The talk covers:

• What MCP actually is: JSON-RPC over a transport, with three roles (host, client, server) and no protocol code of your own
• The primitives that matter: tools, resources, prompts, and elicitation
• Local stdio vs hosted streamable HTTP, and the rule for choosing: just you means stdio, anyone else means HTTP
• Building a C# server as a console app, where the entire MCP part is three chained calls and two attributes per tool
• The TypeScript equivalent with Zod, and structured output with schemas generated from your own types
• Tool design as prompt engineering: task-shaped, curated, described, trimmed, and errors that steer the model into self-correction
• APIs vs MCP, and the wrapper pattern that puts a thin adapter in front of the systems you already run
• The security threat model: prompt injection, confused deputy, and tool poisoning
• Delegated authorization with OAuth 2.1 and Entra ID, delegated-only scopes, and why token passthrough is the anti-pattern
• The servers ArchitectNow runs on internally (Azure DevOps, Harvest, Dataverse, QuickBooks) and the third-party servers worth adopting today
• Where this is going: MCP Apps, servers that ship their own sandboxed UI

Download the slide deck below, or reach out to ArchitectNow if you want to talk about where MCP fits in your stack.