Model-Context-Protocol

If you’re building production AI agents in 2026, you’ve almost certainly encountered both MCP (Model Context Protocol) and Agent Skills as architectural options. Both are ways to extend what an AI agent can do — but they operate at fundamentally different levels of abstraction, and choosing between them (or combining them) is one of the most consequential architectural decisions you’ll make early in a project. This guide breaks down how each approach works, when each excels, the compatibility patterns for using both together, and the production deployment tradeoffs that practitioners are discovering in the field. ...

The Model Context Protocol just got its most enterprise-important SDK milestone to date. Microsoft’s official C# SDK for MCP has shipped version 1.0, bringing full compliance with the 2025-11-25 MCP specification and — crucially — improved authorization server discovery. For the .NET-heavy enterprise world, this isn’t a footnote. This is the unlocking event that makes serious production MCP deployments viable in environments that have standardized on Microsoft’s stack. What’s Actually New in 1.0 The headline feature is the improved authorization server discovery, which lands just as enterprises are grappling with the identity and access management questions that come with deploying agents at scale. ...

ExpressVPN shipped something genuinely novel on March 5, 2026: the first VPN MCP server from any major VPN provider. It lets AI tools read your VPN status and change connection settings directly from development environments — no app-switching, no GUI. It’s a beta, it’s available now, and it’s worth understanding what it actually enables. What the ExpressVPN MCP Server Does The MCP server exposes two core capabilities to any MCP-compatible AI client: ...