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Developing Work Skills · Career & Development

Connect Tools with MCP

Build a small read-only MCP server, test it, and connect it to an AI app safely.

Level
Advanced
Estimated study
About 12 hours
Lessons
9 lessons in 3 modules
Format
Online, self-paced
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About this course

Use the Model Context Protocol to describe and connect a small tool service. Keep the same validation, account permissions and approval controls you learned for ordinary APIs.

What you will be able to do

  • Explain the roles of an MCP client, server and exposed tool.
  • Publish a narrowly scoped tool with validated inputs.
  • Test access boundaries and require approval for a meaningful write action.

Course outline

Module 1: Understand the protocol

3 lessons · 4 h

Connect client and server roles to tool discovery and invocation.

  1. Map the host, client and tool server1 h 20 min
  2. Discover capabilities and handle version mismatch1 h 20 min
  3. Choose transport and preserve message framing1 h 20 min

Module 2: Expose a small service

3 lessons · 4 h

Describe a read-only resource lookup and validate requests and responses.

  1. Describe the directory lookup contract1 h 20 min
  2. Return structured results and honest errors1 h 20 min
  3. Run the local read-only MCP service1 h 20 min

Module 3: Review trust and access

3 lessons · 4 h

Test account permissions, tool output and approval behavior across the connection.

  1. Preserve account identity across the connection1 h 20 min
  2. Validate server output and preserve approval rules1 h 20 min
  3. Test and hand over the directory connection1 h 20 min
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