This workshop will show you how to develop robust, production-ready MCP servers using .NET and Azure. You will see how to go from the code on your laptop, to debugging and testing and into the Azure cloud in a productive way.

We will cover the basics and advanced concepts of Agentic AI, Large and Small Language Models and MCP servers. You are going to learn the details of building MCP servers in ASP.NET Core. In this workshop you will become familiar with developing and debugging on your local development environment, while simulating production circumstances, such as latency, transient errors and complete outages. In addition, we will show how to use OpenTelemetry to get full traceability and metrics for your MCP server in the distributed landscape of agentic AI. We will also show you the hosting options in Azure and how to deploy your working, production-ready MCP servers.

During the workshop you will be provided with access to GitHub Codespaces, so you only need to bring a laptop with a modern browser.

Key learnings:

• Agentic AI and Model Context Protocol for LLM callable tools
• Modern tooling for distributed applications, including Dev Tunnels and Dev Proxy
• Microsoft MCP libraries for .NET and ASP.NET Core
• Testing your MCP servers locally and from cloud
• Adding authentication and authorization to MCP servers
• Hosting options and deployment to Microsoft Azure cloud
• Instrumentation using OpenTelemetry for tracing of AI solutions

Attendee Requirements:

• You must provide your own laptop computer (Windows or Mac) if you are participating in the "hands-on” portion of this workshop.
• All other laptop configuration requirements will be posted two (2) weeks prior to the conference.