Now you can make MCP clients and servers with C# thanks to the release of the official SDK. Do note however that it is currently in preview and that breaking changes can be introduced without prior notice.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol developed by Anthropic, which enables seamless integration with LLMs and AI tools from a variety of programming languages.

The protocol standardizes the interaction between clients and servers, so that your applications can work with any server that supports the protocol, in a plug and play fashion; no need for tweaking you code depending on the underlying API you're going to call. Saying that, and at the bottom line, the MCP protocol can be seen just as that; as a glorified API wrapper.

The applications are many and the repository of servers keeps growing. For instance:

• AWS - Specialized MCP servers that bring AWS best practices directly to your development workflow
• Microsoft Azure - The Azure MCP Server gives MCP Clients access to key Azure services and tools like Azure Storage, Cosmos DB, the Azure CLI, and more
• Couchbase - Interact with the data stored in Couchbase clusters
• Elasticsearch - Query your data in Elasticsearch

You can interact with those Servers who call the underlying API, in natural language. For instance, you can instruct the Algolia MCP server to:

• Search all products in the index where brand = ‘Nike’ and price < 100.
• Add this JSON object to the blog_posts index
• Update the searchable attributes for the recipes index to include ingredients
• Configure my index to rank nebula_award winners higher

Of course, servers and clients have to be written in a programming language. There's SDKs for Python, Java, Go etc. Now it's time for C# to get its own, enabling .NET applications, services, and libraries to implement and interact with MCP clients and servers. You just need NuGet and run :

dotnet add package ModelContextProtocol --prerelease

and you're now ready to start building your applications, i.e for starters a simple server that echoes back the message that the client sends:

A tip when building your servers is to always use the MCP Inspector, an interactive developer tool for testing and debugging MCP servers, to check that you're servers function correctly before writing a client first.

To conclude, MCP is certainly a game changer because it enables users to interact with their tools or APIs in natural language. Still someone has to write the underlying code, hence the emergence of SDKs like this.

More Information

C# MCP SDK

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